The Redemption of Sulva
by Narnian Pricklepig
Summary: A sequel to King Edmund's Crusade, featuring elements from The Cosmic Trilogy. When Elizabeth is drawn back into the world of the Pevensies, can even the ripping up of the work of time save Susan - and the whole world - from her own rising darkness?
1. Author's Foreword

**A/n :** This story is the "sequel" to _King Edmund's Crusade_. It is a sequel in the sense that it is set after the events of the earlier story, and features some of the characters who are in that story, and their personalities, motivations and actions are dependent on the events of that story.

This story is set in the world of Lewis' "Cosmic Trilogy" and familiarity with those stories, as well as the Chronicles of Narnia and _King Edmund's Crusade_ is recommended.

For those of you who dislike such things, this story is quite "OC heavy" and is somewhat "AU" - just so you know.

There is a webpage and a forum devoted to this story (links in my profile).

The world and characters of Narnia and the Cosmic Trilogy are the creations of C S Lewis . I own nothing about this story but the story itself and any invented elements, which I identify myself as the author of.

Final point; this story uses the device (like the stories of the Cosmic Trilogy) that the author is a real person separate from myself - the "Author's Foreword" below isn't an "A/n" like this - it's part of the tale and is, of course, fictional.

Or is it? :)

**The Redemption of Sulva**

**Author's Foreword**

I was often troubled for a "sequel" to the narrative I have made available to the public in the form of "King Edmund's Crusade", something which both myself and Elizabeth regarded (until recently) with a degree of amusement. The story as published does owe a number of elements - specifically events where Elizabeth was not directly present - to fictionalization and supposition, but, in the main, the narrative is as it happened to Elizabeth.

Of course, such a comment and assertion does rather insist on a conclusion many may be uncomfortable with; namely that the narrative as described in "King Edmund's Crusade" is a truthful account of real events. Some may not believe it, citing the fact that within the piece itself it is made very clear Professor Lewis' "Narnia" stories are fictional. Please be assured this is the truth - Professor Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia are fictional inventions of his (there is no evidence to suggest anything else), but Elizabeth did experience the events as described in "King Edmund's Crusade". Elizabeth and I discussed this and came to the conclusion - after some debate and analysis - her whole experience was simply a dream sequence, hallucination or fantasy. This did not, of course, lessen the conversion-inducing impact of the experience, nor did Elizabeth and I suggest for a second that the experience might have been anything else than engineered by the Almighty to convert her.

The alternate conclusion - that Narnia was somehow "real" - was a little too outré for even her. She felt that she had been exposed to a very sophisticated - and enjoyable - illusionary, participationary parable by God using fictional structures. This was a conclusion with which I was forced to agree, despite a lack of evidence for similar events.

Recent experiences have caused us to re-evaluate this view, and the resulting narrative is the fruits of long labor and research.

I met Elizabeth through the Church shortly before her marriage. She and I swiftly became fast friends, bound by mutual personalities and friendship with her fiancé (and later husband) Thomas. I was her husband's best man at the wedding and - nine months later - I was Godfather to her son Edmund Michael.

The sudden death of Thomas during the tragic destruction of the World Trade Center was a catalyst for what could been seen as a "healing event" for Elizabeth; namely the revealing of her experiences to me. It was in her grief that Elizabeth first spoke of her "Narnian adventure" within the context of her reasons for returning to the Church. It was her suggestion that some form of narrative be set down, a task I was only too happy to undertake. The reception of "King Edmund's Crusade" was an excited one among the chosen audience, and - as mentioned above - clamors for a sequel were made.

Of course, a sequel to a real event is not a matter for an author to engineer - Elizabeth had had no more experiences in Narnia, and was taken up full-time with the foundation of White Witch Enterprises and raising Edmund. I married and moved across the Atlantic to New Coventry. Recently, however, Elizabeth came to me with an extraordinary tale - more fantastical and harder to believe than her previous one. Even placing scientific objections to time-travel completely aside, it is certain that there was never an Oscar-winning actress in the post-war period called Susan Pevensie in "our world". Similarly, an organization known as the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments has never been traced, and - in short - the reality Elizabeth appears to have found herself in appears to be nothing of the sort.

Elizabeth and I are at a loss to determine what happened to her; whether her experiences were another hallucination, or if these experiences (and her previous ones) were interdimensional journeys to a reality which appears to have been written about in the works of Professor Lewis, are questions neither of us (nor anyone else) are qualified to answer.

What Elizabeth does state, categorically, is that her experiences (of researching Susan Pevensie on the IMDB, and her newspaper archive investigations into Bracton College and the N.I.C.E.) appeared to her at the time to be revelations of facts everyone else knew, but she did not. It was as if she (a woman from a reality where Professor Lewis' works are known to be fictional, even given the metafictional stance taken by the internal narrative of his Cosmic Trilogy) had been lifted up and placed, without warning or additional knowledge, into the worlds of Professor Lewis.

An important point to note is that the world of "England" in Professor Lewis' work is not ours; this is an obvious conclusion when reading the Cosmic Trilogy given the appearance of the N.I.C.E., but not so much when reading the Chronicles of Narnia. In that, the "England" appears quite normal and quite like ours. It is, of course, not - the Pevensies and Professor Kirke and so forth are not real people, they are fictional characters. This conclusion - while obvious - is an important one. It shows that Elizabeth's interdimensional journey, or hallucination, began at the point she realized her wedding ring was missing. Certainly, she is not within that framework now - an IMDB search throws back the name Anne Popplewell when "Susan Pevensie" is entered - but it is important to realize that Elizabeth's experiences in "England" are more complex than they first appear.

Elizabeth maintains that God (or Aslan, or Maleldil) took advantage of fictional elements to present her with a very sophisticated parable in order to convert her. I agree with her on this point as far as her first Narnian experience is concerned - although I am unsure if it was a vision or hallucination and not genuine interdimensional travel - but as for the second I do not subscribe to this theory.

_She_ did not need to be taught anything new - her experiences did not lead to a substantially deeper awareness or spirituality than she possessed before – yet there is an educational element in what happened to her; an educational element which she maintains I was always supposed to be part of. As the narrative progresses, the reader may be able to see what form that evangelization, catechesis and apologetics is supposed to take – perhaps even before a very particular character within the narrative makes it explicitly clear.

Be that as it may, Elizabeth's actions did - I believe - save the "England" of Susan Pevensie (and probably the world). On her previous "journey", she saved Narnia.

No matter how unreal those worlds might be to others, they matter to me. For this, I will honor her until the stars burn out.

Peter d'Iago, Archdiocese of New Coventry, September 2006


	2. Prologue - After the Tent of Holofernes

**Prologue : After the Tent of Holofernes**

_**(September 12th, 2006)**_

"So," I said with a neutrality I didn't feel as Elizabeth Studdock carefully scraped the bottom of the china cup along the edge of her saucer, "to what do I owe the pleasure?"

Sultry, heavy-lidded eyes lifted straight from the hyperbole of the Odyssey gazed at me like chocolate-wrapped coffee-beans over the gilded rim of the cup. The refracted autumnal sunlight of mid morning in a New Coventry suburb filtered itself through the rustling dried-blood color of the russet leaves, refracting from the machine-tool glimmer of the black diamond set in the widowing-ring on the third finger of Elizabeth's left hand. "So formal, Mister d'Iago?" her sensual lips smiled, her voice an exhalation of chocolate and double-cream straight from an English summer. My own mouth crumpled into a wry grin.

"I felt some formality was needed to counteract your informal arrival." I pushed a plate over the table to her, toast draped in a melting shawl of butter atop Temperance's best china, the plate brushing aside the crumbs from sandwiches and cake. It was eleven o'clock in New Coventry, but four in Mayfair; in deference to my guest I had served what might pass as afternoon tea. Whipped cream and blood-red jam shone wetly as Elizabeth reached forward and took a slice of toast. At my feet, Crumpet the cat reached up with her little kitty paw, wondering who the strange woman with the scent of Europe on her was, and then - when she got no attention - arched her back and leapt onto the window-ledge, looking outside at the sparrows picking at the lump of suet and fat swinging in a galvanized cage and making little excited chattering noises to herself.

"I just happened to be in the neighborhood," Elizabeth said indistinctly, her voice muffled by a mouthful of crumbs. "Good toast," she added as an afterthought that trampled over my reply, "You made the bread yourself? You're becoming a regular Nigella Lawson."

"You did not fly first class over three-thousand miles of choppy Atlantic the week your son is due to start school merely to swap recipes, Elizabeth," I said sharply. From inside the house, the noise of the complete Bagpuss on DVD entertaining Edmund Michael drifted onto the porch. Elizabeth stood, brushing fallen fragments of her meal from the skirt of her immaculate Versace.

"If I'm not welcome," she sniffed, sweeping the long weight of her ebony hair back off her face with her elegantly muscled forearm, "I'll go." She made to walk into the living room of the house, ready to pick up her son and book into a hotel.

I didn't rise. "Sit down, Lizzie," I said, grasping her arm. She stopped but twisted herself free without difficulty, looking down at me along her rifle-barrel nose from her thoroughbred height. Not for the first time, her beauty and grace skewered me. Her hair was darker than I remembered, her skin fresher. I sighed and stood, placing my hands on her broad shoulders and guiding her back to the chair. Reaching for the whisky decanter, I sloshed a few fingers' width into a tumbler and handed it to her, the newly-machined titanium band around my third-finger clinking against it. She took the heavy crystal glass and smiled as she sat down.

"You're always welcome - you know that. And you and Edmund Michael can stay here as long as you like - Temperance has missed her Godson-in-law. I'll even undertake to educate him in more than just 1970s children's television serials." I sipped my whisky judiciously. "But you didn't come to the New World because you missed my cooking." She stared into the amber depths of her drink.

"No, I came here because I missed you." My eyebrows went scrambling up in surprise.

"You missed me?" I grinned. "You'll make Temperance jealous." Shock and horror whipped over her face, and she made to stand again. "No, sit down, Lizzie," I said. "What's the matter with you?" She rolled the glass between her palms and considered the question she would use to deflect an answer.

"How was the 11th here?" She didn't need to say which 11th, and I didn't need to ask - but she spoke as if it were a date long-past, not the day before.

"Ah, yes," I said. "The same as I thought it would be - you can tell the ones who lost someone because they've done their crying already." I paused and looked at her, thinking I knew why she was here. "How was it for you?"

"It hit America hard, didn't it?" she asked. I gave a weak smile, fixing her with a gaze that meant I knew she was simply trying to avoid answering the questions I was asking her and asking the questions she had come here to ask. But we had time.

"Yes, it did - the first major act of mainland terrorism undertaken by outsiders in her history. It shattered their illusion of invulnerability." I paused. "Five years, Lizzie."

"I know how long I've been a widow," she snapped. I spread my hands apologetically.

"What have you come here to talk about, Lizzie?" I asked gently, "I'm willing to stay here eating cake made with eggs that are over-engineered with hormones until Temperance comes home, and then we can all go out to dinner at Greenjacket." I paused and switched on a box-like smile. "Are you?"

"I'll buy dinner," she muttered distractedly. And then her brown eyes sharpened and the sensual mouth twisted into the steel trap businessmen from Lisbon to Tokyo feared. "On one condition," said the CEO of White Witch Enterprises.

"Name it," I answered carefully. I was unwilling to commit myself to whatever delayed grief might be taking her after sixty months of lonely struggle. She looked at me.

"It happened again."

For a second, I did not realize what _it_ might be - she was pregnant? She was in love, married? She had been caught up in the 7th of July attacks and had never told me? And then I realized.

"Narnia?" I asked as easily as I could. She shook her head.

"_Michael._"


	3. Interlude - In the Shadow of the Flag

**Historical Interlude : In the Shadow of the Flag**

Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, London. The home-from-home of America in England. The Embassy of the United States of America to the Court of Saint James.

Grosvenor Square, historically, has always seen a powerful American presence since John Adams established the first American mission to the Court of Saint James in 1785. While the Second World War raged in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower established a military headquarters at 20 Grosvenor Square, and during this time the Square was nicknamed Eisenhower Platz. Even today, the United States Navy continues to use this same building as its command center for Europe and West Africa.

The Square itself is much like any other in London – iron-fenced, grass-plated, with pathways of old stone. It falls under the jurisdiction of the Royal Parks, and a long set of bylaws and regulations is posted at the main entrance on the north-western corner. The houses around the Square – as is common for much of London – are not as old as they might appear; most were demolished in the early twentieth century and rebuilt as neo-Georgian flats.

On the west side of the Square the ugly gray bulk of the American Embassy rears itself in a wall of 1950s glass and concrete, guarded by lynx-eyed Metropolitan police in black hardshell armor. A gilded eagle – its wings spreading ten yards or more – looks casually over the park, past the memorials to the airmen and Eisenhower and Roosevelt, at the Canadian High Commission on the eastern side. One could be forgiven for thinking the park itself has desires to be considered in the same light as the 49th parallel.

But – since September 11th 2003 – the eagle has not looked further than the easternmost edge of the park that is the iron-fenced center of the Square; for since that day there has been something to arrest its golden gaze. Carved in heavy Roman capitals on a lintel of English oak of railroad sleeper girth, the following words demand attention and respect for their simple stark truth;

_GRIEF IS THE PRICE WE PAY FOR LOVE_

These words surmount and perhaps overshadow the first memorial to the victims of the 9/11 attacks outside the United States. Built by Her Majesty's Government to honor the British citizens and others killed during the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001, this monument is designed to stand for six centuries against whatever weather England can throw at it. It is certainly proof against the tears and floral tributes that press against it.

To the south of Grosvenor Square is found Farm Street, an unprepossessing thoroughfare on which a small but beautiful Jesuit Church sits; the Church of the Immaculate Conception. Since 1849, this has provided daily Masses and confessions for the people of Mayfair, and the Jesuit Priests and Brothers there have provided spiritual guidance and academic education to generations of Londoners and not a few visiting Americans.

I know Grosvenor Square well – for Elizabeth has her flat near there and White Witch Enterprises' offices, the company she founded in 2001, overlook it. More than once I have walked the pathways of the park, or stood under the memorials to fallen heroes and victims – and watched demonstrations that try to paint each as the other. I have knelt before God in the Church and confessed offenses against the King of the Universe in silent darkness and then walked out into warm sunlight again. I have walked the halls of the Embassy and received the rarest of documents that allow a son of the Kingdom to marry a daughter of the Union.

But it is to the memorial to the victims of 9/11 that my eye is always drawn – for Thomas Studdock was my friend, and there is no grave, no plot of land, no marker to remind me to pray for his soul. No body was recovered – all that remains of his physicality are the echoes and memories in Elizabeth's flesh, and the young boy she raises alone.

In the center of the monument, there is an oval plaque upon which are carved words which I have read a thousand times and which are taken from Henry Jackson van Dyke's poem "Katrina's Sundial";

_ Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is not_

There is something about those words and, each and every time I read them, I cannot help but think of Elizabeth and the way she and her family have intersected time in and around that little Square – one of hundreds like it in London – and of how she has progressed through each of those emotions, eventually arriving at the eternal point she now occupies.

It was at the beginning of the 1960s that Giovanni Agnoli came to Mayfair. Giovanni's father – Marco Angoli – had served in the Italian armies of North Africa in World War II and, captured by the British during Operation Compass, became a prisoner of war almost without firing a shot in anger. He lived out the years of the War on a Norfolk farm, sowing and reaping and harvesting.

The daughter of that farm was Gwendoline Bailey – a young, impressionable girl with no real grasp of worldly matters. Innocent and beautifully fertile, and perhaps a little naive, the tales she heard of chivalrous servicemen brought a flush to her cheeks. It was, perhaps, inevitable this blushing English rose would be plucked by the dashing Italian stallion who worked for her father.

To his credit, Marco did not attempt anything more than the village lads had tried before they went off to the War. A cynical man (and there were many of them, holding their dimpled pint mugs of beer in corn-calloused hands in the local pub) might have said he knew the way the wind was blowing and that a marriage to an English girl would allow him to stay in a country which was clearly superior to that greasy nation of spaghetti-eating Wops. The few boys who had not gone to war – remaining behind to work the farms – tended to think of Marco as an opportunist; for why would someone as wonderful as Gwendoline choose an Itie like him unless their elder brothers and friends were away fighting the Jerries?

But the village women were more impressed – Marco was tall and handsome, well-spoken and polite. He worked hard, too – even though he earned no wages, and slept in the hayloft. He spoke against the Fascists, explaining how – as best he could – his country had allowed them to get into power. A devout Catholic, he explained how Mussolini and his ilk were an aberration on the history of the Italian and Roman people.

And, all the while, he courted Gwendoline. Her father – a widower, and with no sons of his own – recognized the value of the hard-working Marco, who doted on his daughter. His encouragement was not necessary, but it may have cemented her decision to marry the charming Italian. A year after Operation Compass, Gwendoline Bailey became Mrs Marco Agnoli – her wedding dress made from the parachute-silk of a downed German pilot.

A little less than a year after this the couple had their first child; a strapping young lad who took after his father more than his mother. They called him Giovanni, after Marco's elder brother. Other children soon followed, some taking more after their mother than their father, and Farmer Bailey rejoiced when he saw his family line was secure.

As Giovanni grew, he decided he didn't want to spend his life tilling the soil, married to a girl from the village. As the fifties turned to sixties, he cast his eye outwards and beyond Norfolk until – one day – he simply decided London was calling him.

Perhaps he chaffed against the pastoral idyll which his parents said he should be content with? Perhaps the wind of change blowing from the revolutions of that decade stirred against the flaps of the orthodox tent that was his family's theology? Perhaps it was all of these and none of them – Giovanni Angoli packed his bags and, kissing his mother and father goodbye, went to London.

In Mayfair, he signed on as a junior clerk for an accountancy firm by day and – by night – plunged into the swinging heart of London in the early sixties. He did well in the firm, rising quickly thanks to natural acumen and a willingness to say the right things to the right people. Still a Catholic, at least in name, the Jesuits of Immaculate Conception might – perhaps – have grown tired of hearing the same sins of the flesh, week after week.

It is certainly true Elizabeth Agnoli was the result of a drunken tryst between Giovanni and Vanessa Scott on New Year's Day 1964. It was never confirmed she was conceived on the grass of the Royal Park of Grosvenor Square, but in the heady days of the 1960s, it is certainly possible.

Giovanni Agnoli married the impressionable girl in the spring – his father had to have the English phrase "shotgun wedding" explained to him, but that may have been unfair. Giovanni and Vanessa did love each other – or at least that is the word they used to describe it. It is entirely likely they each meant different things by the word. When Marco was told by Vanessa's father his boy had "got my daughter in trouble", Marco hung his head and said, very contritely, "I think he's got all of us in trouble too."

Elizabeth Maria Agnoli was born not far from Grosvenor Square, on Michaelmas 1964 and was baptized the same day by one of the priests attached to Immaculate Conception. As soon as she was old enough, she attended the Jesuit-run school there – by this time, Giovanni Agnoli was a partner in the firm and making good money.

Educated by Sisters and taught by the Brothers, a natural athlete and preternatural dancer, Elizabeth – dark and beautiful like an icon of the woman caught in adultery even at that age – received her first communion and was confirmed with the name Michelle at Immaculate Conception in the early 1970s. But, by this stage, cracks were beginning to show in her parents' marriage.

It was probably not Vanessa's fault – for, although she was innocent and naive and hadn't fully understood the promises she was making, she had, at least, tried to stick to them as best she could. She had been brought up on fairytales and the prayer book and happily-ever-after. Giovanni had learned other things – although from where, he could not say.

Not even when, in 1975, Vanessa screamed his infidelities to him and a ten-year-old Elizabeth – still wearing her confirmation dress from the day's celebrations – sobbed and screamed in sadness and howled at her parents to stop. But Vanessa wanted an answer – his parents weren't like that, what had she and Elizabeth done to deserve this?

For years after, Giovanni would maintain Vanessa's parting words to him - "Go to your whore!" - were his mandate to leave the marriage. She wanted him to leave, which – while perhaps true – did not excuse his actions.

Elizabeth tried to stop him leaving. He shoved her out of the way and into the wall, bruising her shoulder and making her cry all the louder. He did not look back.

That was her first introduction to "the way the world really works" and the foundation and pillar of her own personal truth. She hated her father for leaving her mother alone and so, in order no-one would ever do that to her, she buried herself in her studies. She thought her father had nothing to offer her and so she accepted his guilt-money and went to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana to earn her degree. His rejection of his marriage vows disgusted her and so she vowed never to marry. His hypocrisy towards his faith appalled her and she rejected it all.

Seen from inside, from her own perspective, it all made perfect sense. Seen from the outside, it made perfect sense too – but for different reasons. She graduated summa cum laude in finance and business law, valedictorian and cheer captain. Her rise to power through the 1980s was meteoric – she was a Vice President by the time she was thirty, the owner of an exclusive penthouse flat in Mayfair, extraordinarily wealthy and fantastically successful. All her friends – and she had few, if any, whom she would call _real_ friends – thought she was happy. Sometimes, she even managed to convince herself.

It was Christmas 2000 in Vienna and Narnia – and Edmund and Michael – that changed all that.

It is not an exaggeration to say she was changed by her experiences, and the changes in lifestyle those changes occasioned changed her still more. For the reader who knew the Elizabeth who nearly dipped her sleeve in her soup in the restaurant just off the Michaelplatz, and now knows the communicant mother and widow who founded her own company, the great shifts in her life will be clear.

But we began in Grosvenor Square, the home-from-home of America in England. Her life – for good or ill – has always orbited or mirrored this small patch of London. And now, anchored by the memorial of oak and stone and bronze to the dead, her mind often finds itself dwelling on the events of a day shortly after her wedding and the conception of her son.

And so we join her remembrances, as she sits on the fifth anniversary of that day in her office in Mayfair – mere minutes from her flat and Church and the memorial. Let us walk past the gleaming ice-gray Aston Martin DB9 with the registration JAD1S parked at the curb. We shall go through the door on which is written the legend "White Witch Enterprises" and sneak into her office. We behold the beautiful woman with hair like flowing night, dressed in bespoke Versace and snowflake-pattern lace with the six-pointed diamond-encrusted cufflinks, and peer at what lies behind those introspective eyes as she remembers the day she lost her husband.

**A/n : **Just for your information, the geography of this section is accurate – the American Embassy, the memorial and the Church are where I have placed them. You can find some excellent information about the various locations mentioned here by visiting the webpage devoted to this story (link in my profile) and following the links there. The only element which is not accurate is the school attached to Immaculate Conception; there is no school there as far as I am aware, nor has there ever been.


	4. Remembrance - American Jyhad

**A/n : **This chapter deals with an event in recent American history and does not pull punches. People should be aware of this before they read it.

Secondly, and I really do mean this, I do not want any reviews which make comments of the nature of "the USA was asking for it with her foreign policy choices", are commentaries on the War on Terror, nor indeed any stupid conspiracy theories suggesting the collapse of the Twin Towers was an act of deliberate demolition, or anything of the sort. I make no judgments about why the attacks happened – I simply use them as a backdrop for my story. Let us grieve for the dead and no more. Any reviews which are inappropriate or disrespectful will result in the offending person being blocked from reviewing my stories.

People are entitled to hold whatever views they wish – but I am also entitled to ensure that such disrespectful views are not permitted to be aired in a forum over which I have control.

**A Remembrance : An English Rose in an American Jyhad**

_**(September 11th, 2001)**_

The sight of the newly-minted Mrs. Studdock emerging from the gleaming length of black limousine parked at the rush-hour curb of downtown Manhattan was perhaps verging on the risqué for even such a cosmopolitan city as New York.

Her husband - rumpled in a gray tail-coat and top-hat with a button-hole withered by re-circulated airline air-conditioning - got out of the car first, stepping into the honking stream of traffic and walking around the rear of the car to open his wife's door. Before he could get there, the latch clicked and something kicked it open. Peering inside, the leather and walnut interior of the car seemed to be filled with ruffled silk and gleaming pearls and the sound of rustling fabric.

A pair of incredibly shapely legs, encased in white silk stockings with silver horseshoes and bells woven into the ribbon-bows at the top, pushed their way experimentally out of the car, the white stilettos questing blindly for the curb. Thomas Studdock caught his wife's well-turned ankles in his hands and - as she got her bearings from them and pushed her legs out of the limo - slid them up her calves and thighs.

The enormous bell of her layered skirt - silk and pearls and lace - bunched erotically around her hips as she hauled herself out of the car, his hands firm and cool on the naked skin above the tops of the stockings pulling her upright. She'd pinged the red-and-black silk and lace garter at d'Iago while he was flirting with the bridesmaids and so nothing spoiled the elegant simplicity of the curves of her limbs. Thomas smiled and then pushed with his tongue and spat chiffon from between his lips. Elizabeth's lace-gloved hands reached up through the sea of ivory and white and grasped the acres of material that appeared to have collected around her chest. She pushed down at it ineffectually, eventually getting her beautiful face free and kissing her husband; only when she was completely satisfied with how that worked did she smooth the skirt back down to her ankles.

"Can't we take these clothes off?" asked Thomas, exasperation glinting behind his gray eyes. Elizabeth gasped in mock horror.

"Take them off? Here? _Again?_" Her face was a perfect picture of shock in the bright, chilly sunlight of eight thirty AM Manhattan that fractured and broke from the myriad windows of the World Trade Center above them. She pointed a perfectly manicured finger at him. "You, Mister Studdock, are insatiable." She tweaked his nose and span out of his grasp, a flouncing bell of white fabric gleaming on the thronging streets of the city that never sleeps. He sighed.

"You know what I mean – can't you just show your friends the pictures?" A look of horror swept over her face as she span back to him, tutting under her breath.

"No, darling," she patiently explained, shaking her head gently, "I can't." He looked as if he was about to speak, but she plowed over him. "And I don't care what Peter's girlfriends said about it being uncomfortable and silly and stuff; I'm going to wear it!" Thomas sprang to the defense of his best man.

"I don't think they're his girlfriends per se – I mean, he's not that sort of chap. And did you notice how they spoke to him?" It was certainly true the collection of women d'Iago had somehow managed to invite to the wedding hadn't acted like they were in love with him, although a certain mocking friendship was possible. Elizabeth snorted derisively.

"Oh, they all just adore him really – his little harem of writers with their fangirl obsessions and the author-cant they share with him; all the giggles and in-jokes and stuff. It's all just a deceptive front." She nodded decisively. "That Sisterhood is just a ego-massaging exercise for him – and what do they know about wedding dresses?"

"Most of them are married?" Thomas opinioned. Elizabeth snorted.

"They call their husbands Cave Trolls," she pointed out decisively.

"Well," said Thomas, trying desperately to keep a handle on the conversation, "I think they are right; not about the troll-thing, but why can't you just show your friends the pictures?" She sighed at his look of incomprehension.

"Look, you don't have to understand – what you have to do is check us into the Marriot, and then join me on floor ninety-six of the north tower where I get to show my scrummy new husband off to all my girlfriends who are jealous that I've got such a hunky guy _and_ that White Witch Enterprises is doing so well." His face remained impassive, and she twisted her lips in coquettish entreaty. "Oh, come on, Thomas – it'll be fun!" She skipped over to him and grasped his hands, gazing imploringly into his eyes and twisting her body to and fro. He laughed and smiled, holding his lovely wife in his eyes.

"Everything's fun with you," he sighed. He linked his hands in the small of her back and pulled her curvaceous, womanly body towards him, her neck arching back and his lips pressing firmly onto hers, each of their tongues moving sensuously against the roof of the other's mouth. She responded to the kiss as only a wife could, her hands tangling in his gray hair and the unrelenting feeling of _rightness _coursing through her body; she was a Christian wife, married to a Christian husband, reveling in her sexuality and physicality, not running or hiding from them, but seeing them as the most sensual signs of the most visible of sacraments. There were years ahead of them – children and families and grandchildren and Christmas traditions and growing old together and side-by-side graves and a single headstone and everything else that had been promised to Adam and Eve, and Sarah and Abraham, and Jacob and Rachel. Her face glowing and her eyes shining with the faint film of tears of joy, she pulled back from him.

"Do you love me?" she asked, almost disbelievingly, "I mean, really, truly, utterly, _love me_? Really and for honest and forever?" Thomas smiled into her eyes and brushed her ebony hair from her face. He bent and gently kissed her brow.

"Yes," he whispered. "Yes, now and forever, I love you, Mrs. Studdock." And then the moment passed with the raucous and raunchy honking of a taxi horn and the yelled, "Get a room!" from the checker cab driver that sped past. The walls of the warm little room the two of them had built in the middle of a bustling Manhattan sidewalk collapsed under the pressure of the outside world and the two of them were in armor again. But it was their armor, and although they were insulated from the outside world, they were not insulated from each other.

Thomas accepted their cases from the driver of the limousine, and as Elizabeth handed over the tip he began to lug them towards the foyer doors of the Marriot hotel. Elizabeth – better used than her husband to the pleasures money could buy – flicked her head at one of the doormen. A bellhop pushing a gleaming chromed trolley scurried towards them. Elizabeth grinned at the way the young boy blushed as she fixed him with her chocolate-dark gaze, his sea-blue eyes and the way he avoided hers reminding her helplessly of a young man she had last seen plastered in blood and gore – most of it not his own – and the undefeated champion of an empire. She shook her head to quell those memories and folded a $100 bill into the neat breast pocket of his immaculate uniform.

"My husband will forget to tip you," she whispered in his ear. "Or, he'd just try to lug those cases around by himself. But it _is_ his holiday too." She straightened and grinned at her husband. "Do you need me to help you check in, or can I . . . ?" She left her sentence unfinished. Thomas smiled indulgently.

"I admire the technique – I either let you go or I admit I am unable to check myself into a hotel." She grinned impishly. "I see now that your coup over the financial district of the City is doomed to success."

She laughed. "But _can_ you check in . . . ?" His eyes narrowed and he tossed his head dismissively.

"Go!" he mockingly growled. "I'll met you up there and hope you will have finished the obligatory feminine oohing and ahhing by the time I arrive." Her eyes kinked coquettishly and her sensual mouth assumed a wry grin.

"I thought you _liked_ me oohing and ahhing?" she asked almost-innocently. "I mean – you kept making me say it on our wedding night. And the next morning. And the night after that. And . . ." She smirked into his disapproving grin and curtsied to him as she fell silent. She turned away and began to move elegantly and effortlessly, as if she floated on unseen gimbals, towards the main entrance of the north tower. "Floor ninety-six!" she called over her shoulder. "Don't forget!"

Elizabeth had been so focused on her husband of three days she had been oblivious to the interest and consternation her dress was generating – but now, as she entered the lobby of the north tower, she became aware of the waves of puzzlement that flowed over her. To be sure, gorgeous brunettes in their late thirties and looking better than women half their age were slightly more common in New York City than many other places (California, Elizabeth reflected, tended to give way to overextended blondes who, having rushed to the silliest time of their lives, were trying to stay there as long as possible). But, a woman in a wedding dress in the World Trade Center at eight thirty-six on a Tuesday morning certainly pushed herself towards exceptional. The fact anyone who knew anything about couture could tell the dress had cost more than most weddings placed her firmly in the 'unique' camp.

As her heels clacked on the marble floor of the suddenly-silent foyer, she could practically hear the eyeballs click as she passed. She grinned, moving quickly through the space she had moved through so often before – but never as a married woman, never as half of a real couple. She doubted that many people in the lobby would recognize her – without the briefcase and laptop and dressed in something other than the off-the-rack Versace that had been her trademark since she was twenty-four she cut a very different figure. Of course, even if she had not been wearing her wedding dress they might not have recognized her – she had been working out more since Narnia, or perhaps was just keeping herself in the paragon of physical perfection a bloody crusade and hard training from the Duchess of the Southern March had put her in. It was hard to tell – but, certainly, physiological and psychological changes had necessitated a whole new wardrobe. Thomas – her _husband_ – was checking in cases packed with bespoke Donatella Versace.

_Husband_. The concept was one which needed time for her to assimilate. The impact of the ceremony only a few short days ago had not truly registered on her conscious mind as yet – although that same conscious mind was well-aware of the very real spiritual impact that the events of the day and night had had on her. She was, as yet, unused to the fact that all her relationships were, in a sense, completely redefined because she was no longer the woman she had been prior to a seemingly-simple promise. She was well-versed in the life-changing impacts of _moments_ – on the road back from an icy castle stone had been melted to chattering streams of living water in a meltwater baptism – but it was normal for humanity, of which she was – and had always been – a good student, to only gradually accept a soul-changing experience. Or perhaps only to manifest it slowly and step-by-step, perhaps as different portions of the person were renewed and explored. So far, Thomas and she had done little as husband and wife – a party, a wedding night, two days of busman's holiday in London and a night-flight to New York for the honeymoon. She knew how she reacted as half a couple to _those _things – but, as yet, nothing else. Time would tell – it would also perhaps change her on the fly, or perhaps she was already changed and merely needed to find out how. Was it the wedding or the marriage that had, or would, change her? Was she changed because of the event, or would she be changed because of _his_ presence as part of her? She reasoned that she would never really know – as nothing stretched before her but the sacramental spousal union she had chosen.

She had reached the elevators, and swept a brief glance around the corridor to take stock. She moved towards the elevator-shaft that carried a car that could take her to the top half of the Tower, hitching up her skirt and gently jogging towards it as she saw the door was closing. A stooped old man with a kindly face and a Yarmulke on his balding head pushed his hand against the sliding metal, ineffectually slowing its movement. She reached the door and - with a single push of a well-toned arm – shoved the door open.

"Thanks," she said to the elderly Jew. She could feel the stares from the other passengers in the elevator – the car was quite full. The old man ran his eyes over her white dress.

"Running away?" he asked mischievously, his eyes twinkling. She laughed softly.

"Only from my singledom," she answered softly. She turned to see if she could reach the buttons – she couldn't. "Could someone press ninety-six for me?" she asked.

A tall man – whose face she could not see clearly, but who was clearly blandly handsome and unsmiling in a trustworthy and appealing way – shifted his broad shoulders in their black linen and cotton and reached out to press one of the small buttons. The elevator lurched and accelerated, eating up the first fifty floors of the WTC in a matter of seconds. The Jew turned to face her.

"You're a lucky girl," he said, "but your husband is luckier. If I were a younger man . . ." he chuckled again. Elizabeth smiled.

"And if I wasn't wearing this band," she lifted her left hand – black diamond and platinum gleamed dull and metallic on the third finger, "I might take you up on that." Abruptly, the elevator slowed and stopped. The doors slid open and the old man turned to go.

"God bless you – and your husband and children," he said. And then he was gone into the corridor and the doors closed and the elevator moved again.

One by one and two by two, the elevator emptied - people stealing glances of wonder or jealousy at Elizabeth's wedding gown - until only Elizabeth was left standing in the little metal room with the expensive carpet and the hum of the coiling cable above her. She bounced on the balls of her feet, eager to be out and to see the friends she had not seen in – was it two years? Maybe three? She stood inches from the doorway of the elevator, impatiently waiting.

Ding. The elevator stopped and the doors opened and Elizabeth was out instantly, moving through the corridors and foyers that she had not been in for years and yet still knew quite well enough to navigate without a map or guide. A few early birds – it wasn't yet quarter to nine – glanced up from their morning cups of coffee in surprise and wonder. "Is she in a . . . wedding dress?" came the whispered comments from behind her. "Is that Elizabeth Agnoli?" came another. "The White Witch of Mayfair?" was the questioning answer from the intern that – fortunately for him – she did not hear.

The building was large, and it took her a few minutes to reach the office she had wanted to. She raised her hand to knock on the door and the other to grasp the handle, intending to sweep in dramatically in a flourish of silk and lace – and then she noticed the name and number on the door.

It wasn't the one she had expected. She raised her head and actually looked around for the first time – this wasn't the floor was had been expecting. She took a more careful glance – floor _ninety-two_? _Damnit all,_ she mused to herself, _no wonder half of them recognized me – I deal with these bloody French bankers all the time. That _idiot_ must have pressed the wrong button – how hard is it to tell the difference between a six and a two? I'm glad he doesn't work for me._ She spun on her heel, hurrying back through the corridors to the elevators. She didn't want to waste too much time and arrive at ninety-six after Thomas. _She_ wanted to be the one to show him off – after all, what was the point of netting yourself a gorgeous, handsome, wonderful husband if you didn't get to revel in it? And what was the point of wearing a fifty-thousand pound dress if you only got to wear it once? As she stood in front of the elevator doors and waited impatiently for an elevator to arrive, she smoothed down the pearls and hand embroidery with immaculate and intricate gloves.

Her 'phone buzzed just as the door opened. She reached into her handbag and pulled it out, automatically taking note of the time – 13:46 GMT, she had to remember to reset that – and the caller – Thomas – as she smiled a fixed smile at the few people in the elevator and pressed "Talk" and "96" simultaneously. "Hello, darling," she said.

"Where are you?" he asked – his voice sounding muffled and tinny over the small speaker. "I'm on ninety-six – where are you?" She sighed.

"Someone pressed the wrong floor for me and I didn't notice," she apologized. "And I didn't look and I wasted time stomping through the corridors like some sort of crazy widow ghost. I am the Miss Haversham of the WTC."

Thomas chuckled. "Technically, she was never a widow. Anyway, I'm here with all your friends – they are very anxious to see you." There was a muffled set of noises from Thomas' end of the 'phone, and then a scuffling sound as if someone was wresting the mobile from him. "Hey! I'm talking to my wife here!" he exclaimed.

Elizabeth couldn't help but smile as she heard the sound of her friends – she recognized the voices well enough to know it was them – screaming in girlish glee. "Oh my God, Elizabeth – he's so hot! He's _such_ a dreamboat! We wanna see the dress! Are you still wearing it?"

Elizabeth heard her husband laugh, and the intake of breath that presaged something else – and then her world changed forever.

It took her an instant to realize what had happened – she was lying on the floor of the elevator in a confused tangle of limbs with the other passengers, either her eyes were closed or the lights were off, the 'phone in her hand was dead and her ears were ringing with the aftershock of a terrible noise. Her stomach felt like it was in her mouth and she thought she was going to be sick. After a moment, she realized what the rushing sound and queasy sensation were.

The elevator was falling – something had cut the cables.

So fast did her combat-trained mind work she was already standing when the brakes hit with a squealing noise of swarfing metal, jamming the car to a juddering stop and sending her slamming to the floor of the elevator again, her wrists crumpling under her weight. Amid the roar of residual noise in her ears and the pounding of her own blood and the dreadful sounds she couldn't place, she could hear the awful, final sound of thick cable piling like a paralyzed snake on top of the car.

She pushed herself upright as the emergency lights came on – dull strips of blue-white fluorescent light that flickered intermittently and threw everything into unflattering, flat color. She stood and looked upwards – with her ears still ringing she couldn't be sure, but there was a definite noise from above them. A terrible, horrible noise of the merciless power of destruction showing the fragile empires of Man exactly what hubris was. The crackle of flames and the scream of twisting girders.

For a second – no longer – she stood stock-still and simply allowed the horror to wash into her mind. She opened herself to it – of all the possible scenarios; bombs and terrorism and nuclear war and plane crashes and all the hideous ways death could come to the world – and just let it have her for a second. She let her mind dwell on the obvious facts – the cable of the elevator had been cut and that meant whatever had happened had happened _above_ her. The building itself had shaken – because the elevator couldn't rattle _that_ much in its shaft – and that meant whatever had happened was devastating to metal and concrete. What could sunder stone could sunder flesh and it had done so above her and _her husband was above her and how could God let . . ._

And she stopped right there, and snapped her eyes open, and took stock of those people whom she, Elizabeth Maria Michelle Studdock, would have to get out of this.

She rotated her bruised wrist – just bruised, not broken, not sprained, be thankful for small mercies – and turned to the mother and her young son slumped huddled in one corner of the elevator. The child was crying – routinely, mechanically, almost as if there was nothing better to do. The mother – sniveling and weeping herself – was rocking her offspring back and forth, arms wrapped around him as if he were a precious talisman that needed protecting and could protect her. Elizabeth put one hand on her shoulder and squeezed hard enough to open her screwed-shut eyes and then shook her until she focused on her face.

"Are you hurt?' she enunciated quickly and clearly, "Can you stand?" The woman looked at her as if she had just come back from the moon. "Do you understand me?" she asked. "We have to get out of here."

"Mommy, I'm scared!" The boy certainly sounded it, and the floor of the elevator was wet with the natural consequence of terror on a child. She pulled a lace handkerchief from her sleeve – she hadn't cried at her own wedding, but her mother had been convinced she would, and had done her fair share of crying herself – and wiped the boy's tears away.

"Hush now," she said softly. "I will get you out of this – my life on it." Beside them both, a pair of expensive shoes squelched on the carpet. Elizabeth looked up at the owner of the shoes – a heavy-set businessman whose skin was gray and blotchy with fear. "Are you alright?" she asked.

His mouth was hanging open, his face ashen as he nodded slowly – detached and removed from the world. "Uh, yeah," his mouth puppeted. "Yeah. I guess so." He blinked once or twice and managed to focus on Elizabeth's face. Mechanically, he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his face with it, straightening his tie and checking his suit. He suddenly seemed to realize what he was doing and how ludicrous it was and dropped the cloth as if it were searingly hot. "What the Hell happened?" he asked blankly. Elizabeth shook her head in incomprehension.

"I have no idea, but we need to get out of here." She looked upwards – the creaking and grinding was getting worse. "The only thing holding this lift in place are the brakes – and if the shaft has been knocked out of true . . ." She left the sentence unfinished.

The businessman nodded, his face paling even further. He pointed at a young black woman lying slumped against the wall, her neatly-plaited braids plastered to her ebony brow with thick blood that had oozed from a gash on her head. "Is she alive?" Elizabeth took one look at her and smiled grimly.

"She's bleeding," she said dourly, "that means she's alive." She knelt down beside her and put her fingertips to the pulse at the base of her throat; it was thin and reedy, but regular. Her chest rose shallowly and rhythmically. She didn't stir when Elizabeth pressed a pristine French-manicured nail into the inside of her wrist. "She's just unconscious – perhaps concussed. I don't want to move her, but . . ."

As if to underscore her point, one corner of the elevator dropped a good six inches with a scream of tortured metal, jamming the car obliquely in the shaft. The businessman, examining the doors with a view to levering them open, stumbled and staggered across the elevator, slamming into the opposite wall. Elizabeth slipped, putting out a hand to save herself and bracing against the wall. The child shrieked with terror.

"We need to get that door open," she snapped. The man nodded and moved to stand beside her, the two of them digging their fingertips into the crack between the doors. They heaved, their muscles cracking with the strain, the metal shaking in sympathy with their efforts. The doors didn't move, and so great was their concentration that neither of them heard, "I wanna help too, Mommy." The child moved to stand between them, trying to help, his little sweat-slick hands sliding on the unyielding metal. Eventually, panting with effort and with her formerly-pristine hair in disarray, Elizabeth stepped back.

"No good," she heaved. The businessman – his limbs trembling with the strain and his chest heaving like the ocean in a Bay of Biscay gale – slumped backwards against the wall, gripping his left wrist with his right hand. "You alright?" asked Elizabeth carefully – trying to recall her CPR training and hoping she wouldn't need it. He cast a pair of baleful, bloodshot eyes at her.

"I'm trapped in an elevator with buckled doors in a building that's about to collapse – what the Hell do you think?" he asked sarcastically. Elizabeth – nerves frayed to breaking point – narrowed her dark eyes at him.

"I meant . . ." she began, but the man interrupted her.

"I know what you meant – am I going to have a bloody heart attack and be a burden on you!" he snapped, spitting the words out at her, veins in his neck bulging, "And what the Hell is a Limey in a wedding dress doing in the WTC?"

Unalloyed grief and tension splintered into shards of raw anger inside Elizabeth. "Worrying about your ungrateful Yankie arse!" she yelled. "I'm not sure if I should really bother!" One of them might have shouted back at the other, but something was tugging a the hem of his jacket and Elizabeth's sleeve. They looked down, to see the small child looking up at them with polite curiosity.

"Are you two married?" he asked innocently. They looked at him blankly, so he explained his reasoning. "'Cause my Mom and Daddy always argue like that, and they're married."

His mother gasped in aghast shock, saying his name in admonition. Elizabeth stood silent for a second, her mouth working as she tried to master her emotions. For a second, grief took her and shook her by the nape of the neck like a rat. Her hands trembled and her vision wavered – partially because of the tears gathering in her eyes, partially because her mind was shutting down as it tried to process her grief. The mother reached down and jerked her son away. "Don't you ever dare say anything like that again!" she snapped. Elizabeth shook her head, wiping away her tears mechanically.

"No," she said distantly, "we're not married. Not to each other." She looked up to find the businessman's hand resting on her arm.

"I'm sorry," he said in a tone which encompassed an apology for his own terseness and an understanding of what had happened to her. She responded in the same manner.

"Yeah, so am I." Her grief was interrupted by the child urgently pulling away from his mother and tugging at her sleeve. She shook her head, surfacing from the whirlpool of her grief – now having its measure, knowing what it was and was not capable of doing to her, aware of its power and pull and abilities – and looked at the boy.

"I saw," he began, "in a movie," he added as a corollary, "some men trapped in an elevator by some bad men, and they climbed out of the top of the elevator and they pulled the emergency handle which opened the doors and they got out and kicked the terrorists' asses!" He realized what he had said, and clamped his hand over his mouth. His mother was about to remonstrate with him, telling him he was _never_ going to go watch movies with Alex again, when Elizabeth stopped her.

"It's a good idea and the best one we've got." She looked around the elevator – she was unwilling to let the mother risk it, and the businessman didn't look in any condition to try it; although he would certainly have to climb through the hatch if it worked. She gestured at him. "Give me a leg up," she said briskly.

The businessman obviously wasn't thinking straight, or at least politely. "In that dress?" he sneered. "Send the kid up; they're always climbing stuff." The mother's face colored and it looked as if she might slap him, but he interrupted her.

"I can do it, mom – I saw it in the movie," he said urgently. "You have to climb up the service ladder and then pull the emergency handle and it opens the doors. And then you get a trash can and jam the doors open and then you get a firehose and lower it down the elevator shaft and you can pull the unconscious people out and . . ." Elizabeth smiled despite herself.

"And then you go kick the terrorists' arses?" she asked. He nodded decisively. Elizabeth faced his mother. "I'm not going to ask him to do it, but he's lighter than I am – and he's wearing better shoes to go gallivanting up and down lift shafts." She looked down to where her son was practically bouncing up and down. "And I think he wants to," she grinned.

The mother looked flustered, concerned, passing her hand over her brow. "Oh, God," she exclaimed. She looked down at her son. "Oh, God," she said again. She knelt down and kissed his brow. "You be _careful_ now, you hear?" she told him firmly. "You do just what the lady tells you."

Elizabeth and the businessman each grabbed the boy around the thigh – the man's fingers curling away from the urine-wet cloth of his trousers with distaste – and the waist, and – with an effort – hoisted him over their heads. His little hands pushed at the hatch at the top of the elevator, not moving it until the two adults shoved harder, thrusting him half-through into the space above them.

The boy yelped, and the adults made to pull him down, but he had his hands on the sides of the hatch by then and was kicking and struggling against them, pulling himself through the opening. He broke free, and vanished into what was clearly a hellish atmosphere – for the elevator was painted with swirls of dark smoke and flickering red light from cruel flames, the noise rising to almost deafening. After a moment, the boy's face reappeared at the hatch.

"There's some fire up here, mom," he said excitedly, "and some stuff's fallen on the roof of the elevator. But I can climb up the shaft and pull the emergency handle and get the trash can between the doors and . . ." Elizabeth shouted up at him.

"If there's not a trash can, or a firehose, don't worry!" she yelled. "Just see if you can get help." He looked at her as if the hick Limey simply didn't get it.

"They'll be a trash can, lady," he grinned impishly. "There was one in the movie!" And then his face vanished and they heard a few steps cross the roof of the elevator. And then the dull clang-clang-clang as he moved up the metal ladder. Elizabeth turned to his mother.

"You've got a brave son," she said simply. The businessman – fastidiously wiping his hand on the seat of his pants – nodded in agreement. The mother looked distracted and wrung her hands, her eyes closed and lips moving is a silent prayer. _How strange,_ thought Elizabeth, _there are no atheists in foxholes._

She was startled out of her reverie by a creaking clang from above them, then the miscellaneous noises of a rolling cylinder. A pause, further miscellaneous noises, and the end of a firehose fell through the hatchway with a loud clatter and a small shower of cold, stale water. It splashed into the mother's face, who started as if from sleep, and then clapped her hands and bounced on her feet like a little girl. "Oh, clever boy!" she exclaimed. "Clever boy!"

Elizabeth was already pulling more of the hose into the elevator and passing it around the body of the black woman, tying it firmly in place above her chest. She craned her head and called up up the shaft. "Ahoy up there! Is this thing secured to anything?"

His voice came drifting back – high and excited. "Yes, ma'am!" he called, "I got the trash can between the doors and I've tied the firehose to the wheel and it's not going to move and I can pull the black lady up!" Elizabeth chuckled.

"Unless you've got Heracles' strength as well as his bravery," she remarked lightly, "that's not happening." She paused and raised her voice. "I'm going to climb up and give you a hand," she called. She reached upwards, grasped the hose with both hands and tugged sharply. It held, and then she jumped and pulled at the same time, hauling herself up. She got one elbow over the edge of the hatch, kicked with her feet ineffectually for a second, seeking purchase, and then managed to haul a knee over the edge. She inwardly winced as a ripping sound of cloth and faint pattering like rain on parched earth showed where nearly-priceless lace and a string of pearls had torn. And then she pulled herself to her feet and looked around her.

She was standing where she had hoped never to have stood; on the top of a wrecked elevator with indeterminate fragments of building – girders and piles of rubble, all covered with a fine mist of gypsum dust – piled around her. About one and a half stories above her, the shaft gave way to a tangled wreckage of twisted steel, all crackling round with smoky flame. Here and there water – half-boiled to steam – dripped smoking onto the iron roof of the elevator. The air was thick with smoke and the crackling, creaking sounds of destruction. From the depression in the wall in which the service ladder ran, a low whistling could be heard – as the fire above her consumed the oxygen in the shaft and the vacuum pulled more in from the lower levels past the partial blockage that was the elevator.

Half a story above her – so close she could almost touch it – were the open elevator doors; jammed open with a trashcan thrust horizontally between them. Light – flickering and pale and stained with smoke and fog and dust – poured through that aperture, illuminating the swirling columns like incense at Church, light filtered through stained glass. The boy was standing in the doorway, his hands wrapped around the firehose. Elizabeth snapped out of her reverie as she saw he was struggling to pull on the improvised rescue harness. She reached down, wrapped her hands around the hose, and called down into the elevator. "Help me lift her out of there," she shouted urgently. She was no expert, but the dreadful noises might possibly be getting worse.

The businessman and the mother lifted the black woman upright, pushing her through the hatch as Elizabeth pulled lustily on the firehose. And then Elizabeth's arms were around her waist and pulling her backwards, lying her as gently as she could manage on the roof of the elevator, trying to avoid the falling rain of water and showers of sparks. The air was thick and almost unbreathable. She leaned over the edge of the hatch and offered her hands. "Come on!" she yelled.

The businessman – his face gray and sweating – helped the mother to grab Elizabeth's hand. His own hands were sliding inappropriately – and probably ineffectually – over various bits of her anatomy in his panic, but she didn't notice. Elizabeth got her hands around the woman's wrists and - with a heave and an unladylike curse – just hauled her halfway out of the hatch. She didn't notice the ripping noise and the fragments of twisted silk that fluttered back down into the elevator as the mother struggled onto the roof. The two of them reached down and grabbed the arms the businessman was frantically offering skywards, as if begging for Assumption.

He was heavier than they had been, and he clearly wasn't well – his breath was shallow and for all Elizabeth knew he might be in the middle of a heart attack. But there are few things in this world or any other as strong as a woman who wants to finish what she is doing so she can go and protect her son, and a woman who thinks she has nothing to lose. They yanked him out of the elevator as easily as unloading a washing machine. The mother stood, brushing her hair back, and moved to the ladder, the businessman following her.

It was when she had climbed the ladder and was in the corridor hugging her son and the businessman was halfway up it and Elizabeth's hand was six inches away from one of the rungs that it happened.

The appalling noises rose in pitch, as if they were all being squashed together by some malice of the universe that wanted the five of them dead. The scream of tortured metal rose until it was simply painful to hear, creaking and crumpling.

And then, with an awful suddenness no-one had any time to admire, the brakes on the elevator finally failed. It plummeted down the shaft into obsidian darkness, swarfing gledes sparking from the corners marking its passage into oblivion.

Above them, the flames guttered and abruptly went out as the air was sucked out of the shaft as the elevator fell like a huge plunger. A choking cloud of sundered concrete dust was pulled down from the wreckage above them, causing Elizabeth and the businessman to turn their heads and cough. The black woman dropped with the lift, jerking to a stop in her harness with a cruel cracking of ribs. She swung in the shaft and bounced off a wall, blood gouting from her mouth.

And Elizabeth just fell.

Not deadly far, but far enough to make her heart jump to her mouth. She had already been moving towards the ladder, and a frantic twist and snatch in mid-air managed to get her hand around a pitted rung. Her hand closed . . . and with a dreadful jerk at her shoulder it was ripped open again. She fell another second, her fingers banging against the rungs, all feeling gone in them. She gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, said, "Michael, help me," and folded her fingers shut.

She stopped.

For a moment – perhaps a lifetime – she seemed to just hang there, silent and serene, held aloft by strong hands. In the instant that she was allowed, her self centered and came to rest.

And then she swung from her hand with a terrific jerk on her shoulder, crashing into the side of the elevator shaft with bruising force. Her hand nearly unfolded again with the awful strain, but she managed to grab a rung with her other hand, flailing uselessly with her feet for a second or two. One of her high heels fell off and vanished into the pitch darkness below her.

She hooked her elbows through the ladder, got her feet onto a lower rung, and just hung there while she tried to draw an agonized breath into her blow-emptied lungs.

From far below, a death-knell clang rose from the bottom of the shaft; a ringing crash that showed the elevator had reached its final destination. Elizabeth looked blearily up through vision streaked with stars.

She had tumbled a long way – fifteen yards or more. Above her, the light from the open doorway was as appealing as the warmth spilling from the Church porch on a freezing winter's night. She unhooked her arms, grasped the ladder, and began to climb. "Thank you, Michael," she whispered in prayer. She paused for a moment. "Or whoever it was – thank you. These people need me."

Of course, she was wise enough to realize that they didn't need _her_ specifically – they needed what humans had always needed; the touch of the divine on their lives. But, for better or worse, Elizabeth was well aware of the fact that she had been chosen to be the particular conduit for the divine for this moment in space-time. But, the point still held.

She reached the doorway and was pulled to safety by willing hands. She slumped down on her knees and coughed and retched, trying to get dust and smoke from her lungs. And then her watering eyes fell on the body of the young black woman – quite clearly dead when she had been pulled from the shaft. The first real tears of the day beaded in her eyes and she lay a quivering hand on her crushed and mangled chest.

"May God grant you eternal rest," she whispered, "and may His perpetual light shine upon you. May you and the souls of all those who have died this day, through His sweet mercy, rest in peace." She stood, spitting gritty fragments from between her teeth.

The mother was frantically cuddling her son, whose face was a picture of disgusted horror at seeing death so close, rocking him back and forth. The businessman was – again – slumped against the wall, his breath coming in ragged gasps and his right hand on his left wrist. His eyes were staring at nothing. Elizabeth touched his shoulder, and he faced her dully as if waking from a drugged stupor.

"You're pretty," he slurred, and then pitched forward, collapsing into her arms. She grabbed him, lowering him as gently to the floor as she could. Cursing, she pressed her fingers to his neck.

"Damnit all, you are _not_ going to die on me too!" she snarled. She risked a look around – the corridor was empty, doors swinging open. Everyone had evacuated minutes ago, while they had been struggling in the elevator. This floor looked relatively unscathed – the damage began above them. It looked like people had already got out, or were getting out.

_Everyone except those above where we are,_ Elizabeth mused grimly, _Everyone except my husband._

But a groan from the man lying on the floor next to her quickly shoved any indulgences like grief aside. His heart was still pumping – fast like a trip-hammer, but it was still running. He could be having a heart attack; she simply didn't know. But what she did know was they absolutely had to get out of there – the building simply wasn't safe to be in.

She stood, hauling the semi-supine man to his feet and draping one of his arms around her shoulders. The mother moved to the other side and did the same. Together, the two women half-helped, half-dragged the man to the stairwell through the thick fog of dust and fragments of drywall in the air.

The fireproof door was shut – the child pushed it open, revealing a stairway partly choked with rubble and debris. Above them, the spiral stairwell was completely blocked off with tumbled masonry and shattered concrete. The four of them struggled over the shattered stone that had clogged the first flight of stairs, and then moved as quickly as they could down the stairwell. It was only when they had gone down several floors, and met no-one, that the boy pulled up short and said with horror, "We just left her there!" He span around and made to go back, but his mother caught him by his collar.

"Don't you _dare!_" she sobbed, jerking him back so hard that he almost fell over. "Don't you _dare!_ You stay right here with me!" She was shaking him, so frightened she was angry with him. He began to snivel, and then to cry,

"But mom!" he wailed. "We can't just leave her there! We _can't!_ It's not _fair!_" He didn't even bother to complain she was hurting him – something had imprinted on his young mind there were greater injustices than that in the world. "Mom, we _have_ to go back and get her!" He struggled against his mother, she was frantically trying to hold him still. He was breaking away, only for her to get another hand on a flailing limb. The two of them were wailing and screaming, Elizabeth trying to hold the boy still, stop his mother from beating him in her panic, and calm them both.

A sharp, hard report. The woman had slapped her son across the face. Her son – already crying – simply stopped dead and looked at his mother, mucus and saliva dripping from his nose and his eyes red-rimmed. She wailed in grief and wrapped her arms around him. "I don't want to lose you, baby, I can't lose you!" she howled. He sniveled, and hugged her back, tears streaming down his face.

"I don't want to lose you either, mom!" he sobbed. "But we have to go get her – we can't just leave her there!" Elizabeth's voice was the final word in the conversation; the words of a woman who knows just precisely how far the universe will take you if it has to.

"You can't save everyone, young man – this is as good a day for you to learn that as any." The boy and his mother looked at her – something in her voice saying more than her mere words. They looked over the wedding dress as if seeing it for the first time, and then the two of them simply understood.

"Oh my . . ." began the mother, but Elizabeth was already in motion, supporting the businessman and rattling down the stairs as fast as her feet would carry her.

Three floors later, they met up with the tail of a long crocodile of people moving with the dull, mechanical movements of a Soviet bread-queue down the stairwell. Few people turned around to look at them; there was a frantic desperation to their slow movements. _Get out, get out, get out, get away!_

Elizabeth was only too-glad to have the man taken from her aching shoulders by a burly security guard who seemed to think that he was in charge, constantly exhorting people to "Keep moving, stay calm, don't panic." She stumbled along, lopsidedly on her single high-heel. The boy walked between her and his mother, holding both their hands. They were around floor thirty when he abruptly looked up at his mother,

"Mom," he said, "is she in Heaven?" His mother looked down at him blankly, without even dreading the question.

She squeezed his hand. "Yes, dear, she is." Elizabeth shook her head, the sense-dulling fatigue and grief eroding any sense of propriety or political correctness.

"We can _hope_," she said flatly.

The woman looked at her over her son's head. "What do you mean?" she hissed, uncomprehending.

"We can hope," said Elizabeth again. "We know nothing about her – save the fact she is dead. We don't know who she was or what she believed, or what she did. We can _hope_ – and that is all."

The woman looked offended. "Well, you can hope if you like – but I _know._ Why are you frightening my son like that? He asked a perfectly reasonable question."

"And I gave him a perfectly reasonable answer," Elizabeth said smoothly and with a dreadful smile. "I have hope, and you have a belief you cannot prove. What does that do for you? I have hope – which is all we can have, and the best thing we can have. I hope, and that makes me try to ensure my hope comes true. What does your assurance drive you to be, to do?" The woman's mouth worked inarticulately for a second or two, and then she fell to silence.

Another dozen floors, nearing the street level now. The child opened his mouth, as if he wanted to ask a question, and then thought better of it.

The stream of people had been exiting from a fire door into the lobby of the north tower, and thence simply milling around. Her hand still holding the boy's, Elizabeth moved through the foyer she had walked so proudly through less than an hour before. She passed a medical gurney – the businessman was lying on it, an oxygen mask over his face. As she passed him, he reached out and squeezed her hand.

"Thank you," he croaked, and then the paramedics tending to him whisked him away and into the bright sunshine. Elizabeth, the mother and her son followed dully, blinking like owls in the sunlight, standing in the midst of thronging humanity moving with random Brownian motion on a New York sidewalk. Now they were outside, the woman shook her child's hand free of Elizabeth's and stared at her with mingled emotions.

"Well," she said brusquely, "thank you, Miss . . ."

"Mrs." said Elizabeth silverly. Before the tension could break, the boy tugged at her dress. She looked down.

"What should I do for her?" he asked very deliberately and carefully, looking at her as someone who might have answers. She bent and looked him in the eye.

"Pray for her, and never forget her. Pray for her until you see her again." And then she stood and simply swept away in a cloud of dust and silk and sweat and lace, not trusting her voice or composure.

She walked mechanically through the sea of thronging humanity, moving away from the leering towers that were billowing smoke. She did not even look up, and so she had no idea the South Tower had been hit until she was a hundred yards or more away from it, surrounded by rubber-necking crowds and the honking of traffic. The sound was a wall of screams and cries and screeching brakes and howling sirens, hemming her in on all sides. She crossed the street, moving between stalled cars with their drivers leaning out of the windows. Traffic was at a gridlocked standstill, two-tone wailing amid blue and red lights trying to cut through it. Running figures in black banded with reflective gold sprinted through the throng of humanity, bulky oxygen tanks on their backs, their chariots blaring ineffectually in oxide-red.

She looked around her, turning back to face the Towers. Finally, something elicited an emotional response as she saw the plume of evil-looking smoke rising from the South Tower as well as the North. This was no accident, this was no burst gas main. Here and there, other buildings were scared with impacts, minor outlying fires burning with greasy smoke in the dawn air. She swallowed and sighed, and was just about to turn back and carry on walking when something happened that arrested her attention.

The South Tower of the World Trade Center simply collapsed, dropping down on itself as floors pancaked onto each other, smashing almost straight down as each level failed sequentially. The roar of the collapse howled through the air, a great echoing noise that simply beat the eardrums into submission and shattered any sense of sanity.

Tremendous gray-white clouds of pulverized concrete and gypsum rushed through the streets, there were screams and howls that there was a new impact, a new explosion. The South Tower was completely obscured by the cloud of smoke and debris.

Elizabeth saw the roiling bank of ash, as if she were caught in Pompey, and just turned and ran. After a few yards, she kicked off her other shoe and sprinted, her breath heaving in her chest, running blindly down streets, banging into people who were doing just the same, all the while chased by the great cloud of sundered rock and stone and cement.

Silence, mingled with screams and siren howls, fell. Elizabeth stopped, bent double, her hands on her knees, sucking desperately for breath. A brisk wind blew across Manhattan – for how long, she could not tell. But when the wind finally cleared the immediate space surrounding what would very soon be known as Ground Zero, it was plain to see that the Tower was gone.

In its place reared a twisted mocking ruin of wrenched steel and shattered concrete. Through the haze of dust and ash, only its outline was visible – the ramparts of some insane castle that man could only conquer at the price of thousands of deaths.

Elizabeth doubled over again – she wanted to be sick, but her body wasn't cooperating. "Oh God, oh God," she heaved, "Oh, help me get through this day!" She crouched down, her head swimming, mind reeling. She didn't know how long she remained there, washed by horrible emotions and an unholy wish death would just take her too. And then into her mind stole dreadful doubts.

_What makes you think that He'll help you out? Did He save Thomas? Did He save that woman, or the thousands of __others who have died today? He doesn't care about you_ – the Voice knew better than to try to make her disbelieve in God's existence, at least right away – _He doesn't give a damn about you; He's left you alive and killed all the rest. And why? __Capricious malice and spite._

She hissed angry blandishments through her teeth. "Shut up, shut up, shut _up!_" she wept decisively. "Shut the Hell up!" Her jaw clenched and her hands balled by her side. "It's a lie, it's a trick and a lie and I reject it!" Her breathing calmed and her muscles relaxed. And then another Voice, one that she welcomed and half-recognized as the one that had lead Narnia to victory, spoke still and silent.

_You are unhurt,_ the Voice said, _and you are an excellent organizer. You know first aid and you can lead people. They were all going to die sometime – death is not the evil people would have you believe. Pray for the dead, help the living. Where is God today? In the hands of those who will help people._

A grim smile crossed her face, and she stood and began to walk swiftly towards a group gathered on a street corner. "Hey!" she called, "any of you chaps know first aid?"

One of them – a tall, stocky man in the unmistakable camo uniform of a United States Marine and with badges that read Corpsman – turned and nodded his bald head at her. He was young, with skin as dark as ebony, and he radiated a solid confidence that could anchor a thousand ton destroyer in a gale. "Yes, ma'am," he said crisply in an unmistakable Southern accent. "Who needs help?" He didn't seem fazed by her sudden appearance or the fact she was wearing a wedding dress. She pointed with one long arm, gathering the people up by eye and moving briskly towards the wreckage of the WTC.

"The people over there," she said. Something about her manner had caught the attention of most of the people gathered around, and they followed their barefoot savior back towards the ruins and wreckage, unsure and uncomprehending – but entirely convinced she knew what she was doing. Years as a vice-president or higher had left her with a voice and an air of command few could or would gainsay; she had lead armies of ragged civilians and woodland creatures to victory against mythological monsters – to get a few scared people to follow her was nothing. The energy and puppy-like eagerness of the average Joe American had kicked in, all of them desperately wanting to do something to help – willing and happy to work for hours and in horrible conditions to make the slightest bit of difference, perhaps willing to fail just so they could tell Old Glory and Liberty they had _tried_.

The Corpsman was jogging beside Elizabeth – even in her encumbering dress and with her feet wincing on cinders and fragments of glass she was out-pacing most of them. "Ma'am?" he asked. "What's all the plan, ma'am? Where we goin'?" She turned to face him without slowing.

"There are an awful lot of people who need medical attention, Corpsman," she said firmly. "The emergency services will be overwhelmed. If we can bind up wounds, set the odd bone, close cuts and take some of the pressure off them, so much the better." They had reached an all-but deserted parking lot. She stopped and felt them settle into a circle around her, looking at the faces of those in front of her. "Are you with me, or not?"

There was a murmur of assent that gradually moved into something more definite. The odor of pastrami, Swiss, rye and thick coffee washed over Elizabeth as a massive hand was lain on her shoulder – she turned to stare into a barrel chest that stretched a sweat-stained white T-shirt over its impressive contours. She looked up, past the curls of thick black hair protruding at the collar, up a stocky neck, past a lantern-jaw dark with Continental swarthiness, and into a pair of level olive-black Neapolitan eyes underneath bristling black brows and a butter-yellow hardhat. "Wha'd'ya need, lady?"

"Who's this Limey-chick to tell us what to do on our own soil?" a suit standing around complained. The hardhat unlimbered the lump-hammer slung over his shoulder with casual ease.

"She's talkin' sense, which is more'n I can say for you." He turned to Elizabeth, about to say something, but the suit interrupted.

"Hey, Mack, you wanna back off with the attitude?" The stocky Italian-American faced him. He seemed to consider.

"No," he said eventually. He turned back to Elizabeth. "I gotta couple first aid kits on the site, that any good to you?" She nodded.

"That's good. We're going to need some alcohol too; to sterilize wounds. Can you see what you can rustle up?" A slightly-built man with the butcher-blue eyes of the Slavs approached.

"In my bar, I have much alcohol – please to come with me, Sir?" He addressed the suit. "You can help me to carry it." With a final baleful glance at the hardhat, the office worker turned and followed the Eastern European. The construction worker smiled, coughing out a laugh into the dusty air and spoke to Elizabeth again.

"What else, lady?" She considered, but it was the Marine Corpsman who answered for her.

"We'll need a water supply," he said. The stocky guy from Brooklyn nodded, a simplistic, can-do mind-set translating the need into direct action, and raised his hammer and addressed a hydrant - but the Corpsman caught his arm and shook his head. "Fire and rescue'll need the water pressure - we're gonna hafta find somethin' else," he wheezed. Elizabeth looked at the two of them.

"We need dust-masks – otherwise we'll be coughing our lungs out after half an hour with all this rubbish in the air." The hardhat let the haft of the massive hammer slide through his ham-sized fist until the hilt rested on the sundered-concrete of the floor and smiled.

"I can get some of them, no problems. Got plenty of that sort of gear in my truck. Hey!" He called the name of a younger man dressed similarly to him, "let's go get the gear for this broad, huh?" The kid – barely a child by American standards, and without the bulky heaviness of his companion - nodded bleakly and moved off with the hardhat towards a construction site a short distance away. Elizabeth, left alone with the Corpsman and a mixed handful of New Yorkers – a thin Bohemian youth with smoked glasses and the abstracted air of a poet, an old man who had rolled up his sleeves literally as well as metaphorically, revealing pale blue numbers tattooed on his forearm, a young couple dressed in matching cameras and carrying tourism brochures – held each of them in her gaze.

"Alright, let's see if we can get some blankets, and some water." She dug into her purse and extracted a couple of hundred dollar bills, handing them to the Bohemian youth. "Here," she said, "go foraging." He looked at the notes with vague disinterest.

"Like, I'm sure they're not going to charge for things we need," he said uncertainly. Elizabeth grinned at him.

"You would hope not, but you've a lot to learn about the world if you think that's definitely the case." She widened her smile a shade and flicked her head and he moved off swiftly through the chaos. "Let's try and clear some space, get some order around here." She paused, and looked at one of the light poles that reared above her. She was not American. She would never _be_ American – but she had lived there and worked there and grown up there and loved there and laughed there and fought there and she _understood_ them. "And can we get a flag up there?" she asked, almost as if it didn't matter.

The hardhat and the kid were returning with their arms full of dust masks and first aid kits. The old man slipped a mask over his wizened nose and mouth and nodded. "I'd see what I can do," he said softly.

Every single one of them was totally unprepared for the collapse of the North Tower, the first thing they knew of it was the great choking cloud of dust and powered rubble that billowed over them, a great susurrating wail and howl of anguish from the people around that was quickly swallowed by screams and the booming noise of the falling building. Elizabeth dived for the old man, dragging him into the lee of an oversized truck as the roiling fog-soup of debris ploughed past them, drenching them in gritty dust.

Coughing and choking, Elizabeth rose, helping the old man to his feet, accepting the help of the Corpsman herself. Eyes streaming and nostrils clogged, she looked back at the twisted, smoking wreckage that reared above them, and then at the bleak, despairing, defeated faces around her, hearing the wails of anguish and hopeless grief. Something inside her snapped, and she pointed a trembling finger at the naked light pole above her.

"_Get a flag up there!_" she howled. "I will _not_ have you cower and let this break you! _Get a bloody flag on that damn pole!_"

From somewhere, the terror of her voice brought forth a man in a Budweiser trucker's cap and a NASCAR T-shirt, Old Glory lying in his arms. He and a couple of other guys clambered onto the back of a truck and flung ropes over the crossbeam of the street light, and the red, white and blue was hauled into place, anchored firmly and blowing in the brisk, dusty breeze. Elizabeth wiped away the tears from her eyes and placed her right hand over her heart. "I pledge allegiance to the Flag . . ." she began for them - half-shouting, half-ordering - the unmistakable tone of command in her voice hiding the fact she did not continue; she would never make that promise.

_ . . . of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands: one Nation under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all._

Around her, men and women alike stopped and stood to attention. The construction worker and the kid removed their hardhats and held them at their left shoulders. The Marine saluted, and all the disparate individuals stood and – for a few seconds, as they said the same words – perhaps really _did_ look like one indivisible nation.

"Oh, say can you see . . ." began Elizabeth in her wavering contralto. All around her, a ragged collection of coughing, rusty voices took up the refrain;

. . ._ by the dawn's early light,  
_ _What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming?_  
_Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight,_  
_O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?_  
_And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,_  
_Gave proof thro' the night that our flag was still there._  
_O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave_  
_O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?_

Next to Elizabeth, the suit nudged her. "You're not even American," he said derisively. She fixed him with a baleful gaze, unwilling to explain the nuances of a history she sometimes wasn't sure of herself.

"Today I am," she said shortly, brushing past him and moving towards the first of a tattered series of injured refugees, bidding her sit down on the dropped tailgate of a pickup and squinting to pull fragments of shattered glass from her oozing arm.

Most of the rest of the day was a blur to Elizabeth – and those she was working with. After a while, her actions took on a mechanical quality; check for broken bones, check for concussion, clean wounds, bind wounds, pressure on impact-cuts, makeshift splints and slings to support fractures. Pass those whose injuries were too great to the official medical services, comfort those screaming in pain, say a prayer over the dying – it was the old man with the marked forearm who did most of that, too weak and shaky to do much more than whisper in Hebrew, but when time allowed others joined him. As the day wore on, all of them faltered to keep up with the prayers in Hebrew or Latin or Spanish or Arabic.

Their little emergency medical station – a ramshackle collection of half-wrecked desks hauled from the rubble, of Formica-topped tables culled from diners nearby, few drugs save the half-empty contents of a few first aid kits, bottles of spirits standing around half-empty, shattered lengths of wood being broken into splints by blows from the hammer or bare hands of the hardhat – was just one of a dozen or more that sprung into existence that day. In churches surrounding Ground Zero, in the front of coffee-shops and delis, men and women downed tools and did what they could. Those who could heal healed, those who could comfort comforted and those who could do neither ran errands and did what their commanders told them.

The hospitals were overstretched, the emergency services swamped. Who knows how many lives they saved that day, if indeed they saved any at all? If they had been asked, they would have said that they just _had_ to do it – even if it didn't do any good. They couldn't just walk away and not help. Precisely _why_, they could never say. But no-one was stopping to ask questions that day.

As the sun dipped down, and the shadows lengthened and the day came to an end with the fading of the light, an NYC police officer stood under the fluttering red, white and blue of Old Glory and looked around. His eyes fell on the Brooklyn hardhat. "Sir," he called - the word given the uniquely-American tone and cadence which marks it not as a term of respect, but just the standard form of address for men of any class whom you do not know. The hardhat turned and looked at him.

"Yeah, officer, whadya want?" His hands were busy with a roll of duct tape and a spar of wood, splinting a shattered radius. The cop swept his eyes around.

"Who's in charge here?" he asked. The hardhat smiled grimly and flicked his head backwards, towards the periphery of the pile of rubble. A single figure could be seen standing alone, an unfamiliar-looking shape ragged at the edges where her dress was torn, silhouetted against the sunset.

"_La Signora Bianca,_" said the hardhat. The cop looked at him bleakly – his badge showed a Hispanic name, not an Italian one – and the Brooklyn construction worker provided a gloss for him. "The White Lady," he said, "that's what we call her." The cop nodded, turning as if to move towards Elizabeth, but then something about her loneliness and isolation spoke to him.

"I'll . . . come back later?" he said. The hardhat nodded.

"Yeah, I guess that would be best," he growled, and turned back to his work.

Elizabeth slumped wearily down onto a dusty shoulder of sundered concrete, the protruding nubs of sheared reinforcing rods ripping and tearing at silk and lace. A significant proportion of the skirt of the dress had gone on dressings and slings, and her shapely thigh was exposed to the hipbone. A crude knot tied over the muscles of her shoulder kept the right side of her bodice from falling down and that arm was naked except for the white armband with the red cross printed on it. She ran scoured-clean hands through her hair, smiling weakly as she felt hairspray and pins clatter and crackle against her fingers, dirt and grime and sweat and dust matting her hands grittily.

She ran her hands over her grimed face, closing her eyes and scraping out the inner corners of her eyes with the pads of her middle fingers. Gazing dispassionately at the mess and muck on her palms, she ripped open one of the alcohol wipes - for cleaning laptop screens of all things - and methodically scrubbed her face with it, the harsh smell spiraling into her nose and tweaking her eyes. Tears beaded in them and - with that trigger - she began to cry, mechanically and rhythmically, her shoulders shaking silently and tears cutting clean tracks of olive skin in her concrete-gray cheeks.

She wanted to pray, to stand up, to go and return to the fray – wanted even just to _want_ to rail against the universe and realize her own weakness – but she was too tired for any of that. Grief was an intellectual thing to her right now, and even its practicalities were brutalized by a night of passion, jetlag and the horrors of the day.

"Ma'am?" The voice broke in on what might have been a reverie had she had the energy. She blearily raised her head and stared dumbly in the direction of the voice.

It was the Marine Corpsman - seeming even darker and more massive than he had before as he came towards her with his jacket in one enormous hand and two waxed paper cups balanced in a pressed-pulp container in the other. The green circle logos on the cups looked to her obsessed eyes like medical symbols, and she wondered what he wanted.

"Ma'am? You don't want to sit out here alone – you'll catch a chill." He draped his massive camo jacket over her shoulders, engulfing her in woodland DPM and the smell of sweat and efficient deodorant. "Starbucks down the road is givin' away free coffee for the rescue teams, ma'am - I gotcha a cup." He held out one of them to her, wrapping her fingers around it when her hands wouldn't work. "'Fraid it's just plain ol' Americano - hope that's alright, ma'am."

Elizabeth nodded. "That's fine, thank you." And then her shoulders slumped and he had to catch the coffee to stop it spilling as she began to sob again.

"Hey, hey, ma'am - don't you be cryin', you'll mess up your pretty face." Elizabeth laughed weakly and pushed grimed hair back from red-rimmed eyes.

"I'm old enough to be your mother, Corpsman," she cried, ineffectually wiping her dripping nose with the back of her hand. He fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, but she simply tore another strip off her skirt and blew her nose on it, tossing the rag into the rubble. The Corpsman smiled.

"You're a little too White, ma'am," he joked, "but you sure are bossy enough. If'n it hadn't been for you there'd be a whole bunch o' folks in a far worse way than they are now - you've kept that station runnin', ma'am, and given us all some leadership." She looked up at him.

"Is this supposed to make me feel better?" she asked bitterly, sipping at the coffee. He blew air between his thick lips and shook his broad head.

"Shucks, ma'am - wish I knew some way to make _me_ feel better. Only thing I can think of is to do my job, and that's to look after people." He looked down at Elizabeth. "And, right now, ma'am, I'm thinkin' you need some lookin' after." She gazed up at him and smiled a watery smile. "You're from England, right?" he asked. She nodded.

"Mayfair, London – near the American embassy." He smiled.

"Well, ain't that somethin' – guess I shoulda got you 'a cuppa tea', huh?" His accent was terrible and she laughed.

"No, my family's from Italy – I've drunk coffee since I was a child. How about you, where's your family from?"

"My grandpapy was born in Chicago – he played jazz sax for the Mafia; or so he says." Elizabeth smiled, remembering the fanciful tales her own grandfather had told her – tales she had had a hard time believing even when she was seven. "He did a good turn for a gangster's moll and she shuttled him down to New Orleans." He pronounced it _N'yallans_. "He met my grandma there and my family's been there ever since."

Elizabeth looked at the young man next to her. "What are you doing in New York? It's a long way from home." He smiled at her.

"Vistin' my uncle – he plays jazz in a bar over in Queens." He paused. "You should come over and have a few mint juleps with us, ma'am – when all this is over. They do a mean gumbo, too, ma'am – it ain't Italian, but it's good."

She laughed. "They show the Saints' games?"

"Heck yeah, ma'am!" He furrowed his brow. "You a who dat, ma'am?"

She nodded. "On any given Sunday – Saturday, I'm a Domer." He grinned. "What's your name?" she asked. He held out a massive callused paw.

He said his name, and then added to it. "Corpsman, Second MarDiv, Second Battalion Sixth Marines, Juliet Company, Third Platoon." She could hear the salute in his voice as he enunciated each word with pride. She smiled and nodded her head respectfully at him, considering how she should respond. _Governor of the Lone Islands_ had a definite ring to it, but she doubted he would understand - and she wasn't in the mood to explain.

"Elizabeth . . ." a fractional pause, "Studdock, managing director, White Witch Enterprises." She took his hand, his dwarfing hers. He smiled at her, powerful muscles crushing her bones for a moment, and then let go. He licked his lips nervously.

"Miss Elizabeth." She smiled at the quaint form of address, but the implication of singledom was a knife in her heart. "Some of the guys have been wonderin', what's with the wedding dress?" She swallowed the lump in her throat and bit the inside of her lip.

"I got married on Saturday, my husband and I were spending our honeymoon in New York. I was wearing it to show off to some girls I know who work . . . who used to work . . . in the North Tower." He nodded sympathetically.

"Kinda messed up your honeymoon, huh, Miss Elizabeth?" he grinned at her. She smiled back at him, her cheeks bunching and cracking the film of dried tears and rock dust. She nodded.

"Especially for my husband," she said lightly. "He's dead." The Corpsman closed his eyes and winced.

"Hell, I put my foot in it there," he muttered. "Dang, but I'm sorry, ma'am - did you just find out? Is this why you came over here, to be on your own?" She shook her head.

"No, I've known since eight-forty-six; he was on one of the floors that got hit." Her voice was flat, not emotionless, but controlled and supremely confident and accepting. There was an underlying strength to her that nothing could deny – even sitting amid the ruins of one of the most potent symbols of a great civilization in a tattered refuge dress that now mocked what it represented, clutching a symbol of American capitalism like a talisman, she radiated and reflected a profound determination. The young Corpsman stood in shocked awe, looking at the older woman with new respect.

"You . . . knew? Ma'am?" he gaped, "You've known all day, and you've managed to hold it together and lead us and put together this station out of nothing and keep it runnin'?" She smiled a terrible smile at him, olive-dark eyes kinking.

"You're going to call me a heartless ice-queen bitch, aren't you?" she said, thinking he would never understand. He saw the crystal tears beading in her eyes and the golden crucifix above her cleavage and shook his head.

"No, ma'am – I just wish we had you in the Corps." He looked at her afresh, as if seeing her for the first time, trying to take in the ineffable strength that flowed from this woman even when she should have been defeated and broken and destroyed. "Ma'am, who _are_ you?"

She drained the last of her coffee and crumpled the cup, tossing it accurately into a trashcan fallen from an office high above. She stood, stripping off the jacket and thrusting it into his arms. "I'm a soldier in a war," she said shortly, "and my Commander-in-Chief has already proven He can't die." She pushed past his stunned form. "Come on, let's get back to the lines."

**A/n :** The unit designation the Corpsman gives is fake – there is no Juliet Company in that Battalion. I don't know why, but there isn't. This is a deliberate choice to make it very clear that this whole piece is, in fact, fiction.

The Pledge of Allegiance and the excerpt from _The Star Spangled Banner_ are used without permission. It is my belief that these words are practically in the public domain, and I would not know who to get permission from, even if it were necessary.


	5. Part I Chapter 1 - Revelations

**Part I : Stranger in a Strange Land**

**Chapter One : Revelations**

_**(September 11**__**th**__**, 2006)**_

"Mrs Studdock? Mrs Studdock?"

Elizabeth started from where she was rotating her wedding ring around the third finger of her left hand with the fingers of her right and looked up at Melissa. It took her a moment to assimilate and process the girl's Australian accent. "Hmm?"

"Mrs Studdock?" Only now did Elizabeth notice the light was blinking on her 'phone and the muted chirping that served for a ring was pulsing in time with it. Melissa had left her desk and come to the doorway of Elizabeth's office, leaning in and rapping on the outside of the frame with her knuckles. "Mrs Studdock? Giovanni Agnoli on line one for you, ma'am."

Elizabeth ran a hand over her tired face, trying to massage herself back into the now. "Thank you, Melissa," she said distractedly, reaching for the Bluetooth earpiece and looping it into place over her right ear. As she did so, she pushed back a wandering lock of hair from her brow with her left hand. She paused for a second, looking blankly at the third finger and wondering why she did. It was only as she pressed the answer button on the phone that she realized what it was.

Her wedding ring was missing.

"Hey, Babbino," she said distractedly, lifting up her laptop and the loosely-stacked papers in front of her, hunting underneath them. It couldn't have gone _far_. "How's tricks?"

Her father's rumbling Italian voice buzzed in her ear. "Ciao, Lizzie." As the sound filtered its way through years of olive-oil and black coffee, Elizabeth smiled - only her father called her Lizzie. "I'm only calling because . . ." A question hung somewhere in the Bluetooth waves.

"Because you wanted to see how I was on the fifth anniversary of the day I became a widow?" Elizabeth asked flatly. She respected affection and compassion and care, but she was damned if she was going to have people pussy-foot around the issue like she was made of gossamer. Her father chuckled indulgently at his incomparable daughter.

"No, Lizzie - I know how you'll be; better than anyone else in the world - and that includes me." He paused - she could practically see his heavy fingers twitching as they wanted to reach for a cigarette. "No, I just called to remind you to watch that Susan Pevensie tribute program this evening."

For a second, Elizabeth's mind went blank. "I'm sorry, Babbino," she said politely and vacantly, "What did you say?" Her father gave his rumbling laugh again.

"Are you sure you're getting enough sleep, Lizzie?" he asked cheerfully. "The BBC tribute to Susan Pevensie? It's on tonight – eight o'clock." Elizabeth blinked once or twice and wondered if this were one of her father's jokes.

"Susan . . . Pevensie?" she asked. What she meant by her question was entirely different to what her father thought she meant. He laughed again.

"Bambina, bambina – you are working yourself too hard. You know I'll take little Edmund for a weekend so you can get away if you like." When she made no response, he thought she was offended and quickly moved on. "Susan Pevensie – the actress? The one you really like?"

Elizabeth's mouth worked inarticulately for a second or two – this had to be one of her father's jokes. The jokes he wasn't famous for and never made; _those_ jokes. She was about to respond, when Will's voice – raised to a half-shout – drifted through the ajar door. She wasn't in the mood for jokes she couldn't get. "Look, Babbino, I've gotta go – I'll call you back, okay?"

She pulled the earpiece free before he said goodbye, held it in front of her mouth and said "Ciao, Babbino – love you" as she stood and moved around the table. Tossing it accurately onto the desk behind her, she stepped out into the main office.

White Witch Enterprises was a small organization – aside from a handful of freelancers scattered across the globe whom she occasionally employed when she needed local talent, it was just her, the secretary-cum-receptionist Melissa (who, like most secretaries-cum-receptionists in the capital seemed to be, was Australian) and Will. Will was young – she had taken him on to help build her nascent company in 2001 pretty much straight out of LSE; provided you ignored six months flipping burgers at a McJob, that is. Since then, she had managed to mold what was originally a very flighty, unsure and nervous – albeit knowledgeable – boy into a quick-witted, razor-tongued, utterly dependable young man whose knowledge in certain areas exceeded even her own. He spoke Mandarin, Russian and Japanese like a native – the product of a new generation coming out of the universities. Elizabeth felt almost obsolete with her broad base of European languages and a later unfinished gloss of the Orient.

But, right now, Will was perhaps wishing he had his boss' command of the Gallic language – he was on with France.

"Listen up and listen good," he snapped down the international line, "You call her that again and I'll drop the stock just to burn your arse, you understand me?" There was a pause. "_All_ business is personal – if you learn that you might start actually doing some." Elizabeth smiled as Will repeated one of her own adages. "And au revoir to you, too." He pressed the disconnect button on his 'phone, spinning a pen between his clever fingers. "Idiot," he said quietly.

"If they nix the sale, have we still got buyers?" asked Elizabeth carefully. Will was good, but he could have a hair-trigger temper. The young man unhooked his earpiece and practically came to attention and pointed at two blinking red lights on his 'phone.

"Yes, Mrs Studdock," he said with the muted formality she still hadn't managed to knock out of him. "I have Russia and Japan pretty-much in a bidding war – frankly, I'd quite like the French to back out. The last thing I really need today is Euros."

Elizabeth might have remonstrated with him for his anti-Eurocentric worldview, but they had had this conversation before and she had to admit he made some good points. Instead, she sighed and passed a hand over her eyes. "Will," she asked plaintively, "how many more times must I ask you to call me Elizabeth?" Will smiled and inclined his head.

"At least once more, Mrs Studdock, as always." His 'phone chirruped; France again. He hooked the Bluetooth headset around his ear and pressed 'Answer'. Elizabeth's finger delicately slammed down on 'Hold'.

For a second, Will's eyes looked down at Elizabeth's – their bodies less than a hand's-breadth apart, their faces so close he could have bent to kiss her. But he didn't, and neither did he blush and look away. _Well,_ thought Elizabeth, _that is that settled satisfactorily._

Elizabeth knew – without any sense of false-modesty – she was beautiful. She had always, ever since she was a child, been stunningly attractive and – even now, when she was turning forty-two in two weeks – she was still breathtaking.

It had been one of those things which – out of pure vanity – she had taken for granted and – out of pure selfishness – taken advantage of before Narnia. She had never really boasted of her beauty, but rather had flaunted it so much and boasted of the prizes it had won her so much such a mere, tawdry thing as trumpeting her own sexiness would have seemed the very acme of modesty.

Yet in displaying her sexiness she had neglected her sexuality for many long years; she had carpet-bombed her uterus with chemical pollutants that had made her womb a barren landscape where nothing would grow. She had used sex for her own ends, and ended up being used on more than one occasion. She had taken her own appeal for granted and took advantage of it, and it had done just the same to her.

Her conversion had restored that to her; perhaps the single thing about it which brought her the most joy on a simple, emotional and intellectual level. She had been able to become a woman – perhaps _again_, but perhaps not, given that the rot of her so-called feminism had set in long before her figure, hormones and psyche began to round into voluptuous adolescence – and to truly live the life she was supposed – as a woman – to live.

Her contemporaries and compatriots – women like her in all the ways God might notice – were aghast at her engagement to Thomas. "Why," they had remarked, taking the old adage and flipping the gender around into something crass and bawdy, "keep the ox when you can get your furrow plowed for free?" They had all laughed – Elizabeth had not.

Nor had she laughed when they rang her – with mouths full of condolences and wombs full of chemicals – to express their grief over her loss and commiserate about her "condition". "That _condition_ has a name," she had said silverly, "It will be Edmund Michael or Susan Hylonome Studdock". Despite the strength of their arguments – and, really, what _was_ the point of a child for a woman like her if there was no marriage to keep together? - and the inescapable fact if she _really_ wanted to focus on White Witch Enterprises she didn't need to be paying for a full-time nanny, she had remained unmoved. When she told them children did not keep marriages together but marriages kept children together, and she was not going to hire a full-time nanny as she was – in fact – capable of being a mother in more ways than simple biology, they had not called again. She did hear the rumors of a planned "intervention" and the offer of a discrete "procedure" from a "_very_ reliable female health-care professional", but nothing ever came of them.

As she remarked to many of her friends – all of whom were either new, or formerly the people one hung around with out of a sense of guilt and the hope of osmosis of piety - "It is strange that women's health-care professionals mostly carry out procedures which are none of those things."

And so her satisfaction at Will's lack of reaction – or, rather, lack of conscious reaction, for she saw his pupils flare and felt his breathing and pulse quicken – was manifold. There was not, as might be suspected, some pious-outpouring of joy she was no longer beautiful – for, as Will's natural male reaction evidenced – that was a flat lie. Too often, she reflected, humility was clever men trying to believe they were fools and gorgeous women trying to believe they were plain; an attempt to treat manifest nonsense as the truth at the very least, and simple bald-faced lies at worst. Humility was being able to rejoice in the beauty in the world – in the beauty of yourself, of something you made, of something someone else made – and be glad of that beauty, and be neither more nor less happy than you would be if it "belonged" to someone else.

Rather, her satisfaction stemmed from not a touch of maternalistic pride – for she _was_ old enough to be Will's mother – he managed to keep his mind always on the girl he was courting (she knew it was Melissa, despite their attempts to keep it a secret), but mostly from the simple satisfaction that came with being genuinely feminine; of being beautiful without inspiring lust, of being appealing without being available. It did make life _so_ much easier when you had managed to train your subconscious and muscle-memory into not advertising the car as being available for a test drive, in a manner of speaking.

She looked in Will's eyes. "Let them wait," she said flatly, "I don't really want Euros either." She paused. "What did they call me?"

Will – who had not blushed when Elizabeth, on whom he had had a helpless crush for the whole of the first year he had known her, stood inches from him – turned away as his cheeks flared red. "The White Witch, Mrs Studdock," he said, embarrassed to even say it. She shrugged.

"Well, that's hardly surprising," she said with a wry grin. She had to admit the epithet was common and perhaps earned. Will's face twisted as he turned back around.

"I don't even know why they say it!" he exclaimed. "I mean, I know it's the name of the company and everything, but, even so . . ." Melissa put down her pen and chimed in.

"Yeah, I've been meaning to ask you, Mrs Studdock – what's the deal with White Witch and everything?" Elizabeth looked at her as if she were out of her mind.

"Jadis?" she said, puzzled, gesturing vaguely at herself to encompass the snow-flake pattern jewelery and accents on her clothes. At their blank looks, she continued. "_The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe_? Narnia?" Melissa's face deepened in confusion.

"It's a town in central Italy – I thought your family was from Florence?" Melissa had a Bachelor's in Modern Eurasian History and an almost encyclopedic knowledge of European geography.

"And what does the registration of your car have to do with this?" asked Will, privately wondering if the grief of the day – which he knew better than to reference – might be getting to her.

A whisper of something close to fear touched Elizabeth's skin. "Lewis?" she asked softly and carefully, "C. ? The author?"

"Biographer of Professor Elwin Ransom of Cambridge," said Melissa promptly.

"Christian apologist," said Will, "an Anglican." He scratched his neck judiciously. "Shaky on Mary and the authority of the Pope, but pretty solid otherwise."

Elizabeth barely heard Will – she looked at Melissa for a second, blinked once or twice, and then simply spun on her heel. "I'll be in my office," she said tightly. The door clicked shut behind her before either of them could make a reply, leaving them exchanging uncertain glances over Melissa's computer screen. Will shrugged and picked up the French line. "Bonjour M'sieur Crapaud!" he exclaimed into the earpiece he was holding in his hand. He looped it over his ear, winced at the torrent of angry French, and then pressed 'Mute'.

"It could very well be one of those days," he remarked to Melissa, casting a worried glance at Elizabeth's office door.


	6. Part I Chapter 2 - Investigations

**Chapter Two : Investigations**

Elizabeth let the door swing shut behind her and pressed 'DND' on her 'phone, sliding herself into her chair as she did so. Her room was an elegant space in the office of White Witch Enterprises, muted in simple blues and grays with views over the park. It served not just as her own personal workspace, but as the main meeting and conference room for her company. Comfortable chairs, a mini-bar and fridge, and gigantic widescreen television dominated half the room, her curving etched glass desk rising like organic ice from the glossy gray floor to take up the other half. The rest of the décor was simple; a handful of pictures on the walls – Edmund Michael growing up, reproductions of Renaissance and Classical depictions of the Archangel Michael – one or two simple alabaster statues, original production artwork from "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" . . .

Of course, that wasn't there now – and on the bookshelf where the first editions of the Chronicles of Narnia had sat other books took their place. She barely glanced at the changes in her office – that was something relatively easy to accomplish. She wasn't about to fall for some stupid trick – she needed to look at the things which couldn't be changed.

She grasped her laptop's mouse, remembering what her father had said to her.

_Susan Pevensie . . . the actress . . ._

With the jerky movements of someone who is nervous and doesn't want to admit it, she navigated around the screen. Start. Programs. Internet explorer. Address bar. URL of the Internet Movie Datab . . .

_The one you really like._

She changed her strategy. Favorites. Personal. A list of links appeared – most of them she recognized. But it was the one that she did not which floored her.

She slumped back in her chair – _Susan Pevensie at the Internet Movie Database_.

It took her a second or two to summon the courage to click the link, and a second or two for the computer to load the page.

From a line of pictures about the size of postage stamps, Susan's hauntingly beautiful face – at a range of ages, from only a few years older than Elizabeth remembered to a wonderfully well-preserved late seventies – stared back at her. She blinked and whirled the mousewheel – the screen rolled down, listing an impressive body of work. Elizabeth noticed, with a sinking jolt of just how far out of her depth she was, that virtually all of them were in purple, not blue. A _visited_ link. She wasn't even feeling sure of _herself_ – let alone the universe she found herself in.

She scrolled back upwards – Awards; five Academy wins, twenty-three nominations; assorted examples of lesser recognition. Susan was a _good_ actress. Elizabeth clicked on the mini biography, skimming the dense, poorly-edited prose with a practiced eye.

_. . . educated the University of Notre Dame, Indiana . . . family killed in tragic accident 1949 . . . prominent actress of the post-war generation in the United States . . . unconfirmed connections to the Mafia . . . made famous by playing Maid Marion in a series of Robin Hood movies . . . active member of the Church . . . outspoken opponent of the space program . . . divides her time between houses in Arizona and London, England . . ._

Elizabeth quickly read the unsorted pieces of trivia below the biography – three in particular stood out;

_Has never married, and answers all questions about her love-life with "I'm not married, and __that should answer your questions."_

_ Keen archer and swimmer – performed all her own stunts in _Robin and the Silver Arrow (1953)

_Ranked #1 in Empire magazine's "Most Beautiful Movie Stars of All Time" list [November 1998]_

Elizabeth let go of the mouse, rubbed her hands over her face and blinked hard a few times. She looked at the screen again, checking the URL. She closed the browser, re-opened it, entered the URL of the main site manually and typed **Susan Pevensie** into the search engine. One match – the same page as before. Google. Typed **"Susan Pevensie" AND Narnia** into the engine.

No matches.

Fed the engine the bare naked name **Narnia**. A handful of pages in Italian from the tourist board. **C. Narnia** returned nothing.

For a minute, Elizabeth sat in her chair and drummed her fingers nervously on the edge of her desk, trying to think of something else to search for so that she would not have to come to the conclusion that she already had.

Abruptly, an idea struck her – she opened another browser window, leaving the failed Google search open on her desktop. The Times of London, the archives.

**Bracton AND NICE**

The search took less than a second – and it filled the screen with dozens of articles. She skimmed through the headlines . . . _Cabinet Announces Creation of National Institute of Co-Ordinated Experiements . . . Opposition to NICE Increases . . . NICE Offices to be Established at Edgestow . . . _she opened a few of them and scanned them quickly; the prose was the complex form she remembered from the days before the dumbing-down of the media, but she could read them fast enough. Mainly because she knew the places and the names and the stories.

It was the byline on an editorial headed _Riots in Edgestow Demonstrate Necessity for Sanitary Executive_ that caught her attention.

M. G. Studdock.

Mark Gainsby Studdock. The name of the man who, in _That Hideous Strength_, had written this the words of this very article for inclusion in "the most respectable of our papers". And the man who, five years and three days ago, had put a lean arm around her and smiled under the faint scar on his upper lip, and said, "Jane and I are _so _happy for you and Thomas!"

Mark Studdock, her father-in-law. The enormity of it swamped her – her head was reeling and she could not concentrate. This was all totally impossible – she was (she felt) well-enough versed in travel into worlds she had thought fictional to make sense of this, but she just couldn't. The fact she had moved into a world where not only was the fictional real, but she was real too – for there was clearly an Elizabeth Studdock here, for who else was the managing director of White Witch Enterprises? - was too much for her. Not only had the world changed, but her family too.

This wasn't a question of her stepping into another world – this was another world stepping into her. She didn't even know who she was any more.

This _had_ to be some sort of trick, a clever computer hack, a stupid joke by her father and Will and . . .

Melissa. Melissa knew history and she would be morbidly afraid of displeasing Elizabeth. It would be unlike her to think of this thing herself, and she could be swiftly persuaded to tell the truth. Elizabeth pressed the intercom button. "Melissa," she said briskly, "Can you step in here for a minute?" The Australian didn't even bother to acknowledge, but simply opened the door to Elizabeth's office and stepped inside.

"You wanted to see me, Mrs Studdock?" Elizabeth steepled her fingertips.

"Yes, Melissa – sit down." Slightly nervously, wondering what all this was about, she did so. Elizabeth tended not to invite her into her office – she came out to the main office where Will and Melissa worked, reserving her inner sanctum as just that. "Melissa," Elizabeth began carefully, "I realize that it's nice sometimes to play a joke, to have a bit of fun, but . . ." She paused – Melissa's face was a picture of panicked uncertainty. Elizabeth tried a different, more direct and yet more oblique tact. "Tell me about the NICE." She pronounced it as if it was a single word meaning 'pleasant'. Melissa's brows went scrambling up in surprise.

"Mrs Studdock?" she asked. Elizabeth smiled a distasteful smile.

"You know, the NICE – Edgestow, Bracton. Come on, Melissa," she said sharply, "you know this."

"Oh!" exclaimed Melissa, as if she had just remembered she was supposed to know something. Elizabeth kinked her eyes at her with a grim sense of satisfaction, which quickly faded as the girl revealed why she'd been unable to follow the older woman. "You mean the N.I.C.E., Mrs Studdock." Elizabeth's lips trembled and she held her right hand with her left to stop it shaking. Melissa seemed to consider. "It was on the syllabus at the University, but . . . well, if you'll forgive me, your father-in-law was there. He'll know a lot more than I will – no-one's really spoken about the Edgestow Incident." Elizabeth continued to look at her blankly. "I mean," said Melissa, "I can give you the basic history if you like. The N.I.C.E. was formed by an Act of Parliament in . . ." Elizabeth abruptly stood and interrupted her.

"You're not joking, are you?" she snapped. "This isn't some bucking joke, is it?" she shouted. For an instant, she paused – ashamed that she had been forced into such a horrible swearword, and then realizing she had said _bucking_. "You're deadly serious, aren't you?"

Melissa was on the verge of tears. "Mrs Studdock, I don't understand. If I've done something wrong I'm . . ." Will's head appeared at the door.

"Mrs . . . Mrs Studdock," he began haltingly, but with the indefinable and undeniable quality of the masculine head of the family on him, "I would really prefer it if you would not speak to Melissa like that." Elizabeth turned to face him.

"Narnia, Will," she said angrily. "Narnia – what do you know about it? _I'm serious, Will!_" The young man stepped into her office, his hands spread defenselessly.

"I'd never heard of it until this morning, Mrs Studdock – like Melissa said, it's a town in Spain."

"Italy," hissed Melissa.

"Italy," corrected Will.

Elizabeth stepped towards him. "Susan Pevensie?" Will carefully moved until he was between the two women.

"She's your favorite actress, Mrs Studdock."

Elizabeth asked the final and hardest question of all. "The Edgestow Incident?" Will and Melissa shared a look.

"In the winter of 1949," said Melissa carefully and deliberately, "the town of Edgestow was wiped off the map by a localized . . ." she searched for a word which had eluded historians for over fifty years ". . . _event_. The majority of the population was not in Edgestow at the time, for reasons which are not clear and which – frankly – defy rational explanation. As well as the town of Edgestow being destroyed by what has been variously described as anything from an accidental atomic explosion to the Sodom and Gomorrah of the twentieth century, the headquarters of the N.I.C.E. were destroyed." She paused and continued. "Most historians consider the destruction of the N.I.C.E. was the only event which prevented the downfall of the current system of government and the institution of a dictatorial regime. A number of individuals – including prominent members of the Catholic Church – have suggested there may have been some form of supernatural involvement." She paused again and licked her lips. "And, Mrs Studdock, as I said before – your father-in-law was there."

Elizabeth glanced between the two of them – reading their faces. There was not a hint of duplicity in anything they said or did. Neither of them were cruel enough to take a joke this far – nor was either of them stupid enough to actually attempt to hack her computer. The simple, undeniable facts of the situation smashed into her like a train wreck. She slumped and almost swooned – Will was at her side in a second, supporting her and gently sitting her down on the edge of her desk.

"Mrs Studdock," he said, "I know you don't like me to mention this, but . . . I think today might be getting to you. I think you need some help – would you like me to call Mr. Agnoli?" Elizabeth shook her head.

For a second, she just sat on the edge of her desk, her head bowed, repeating childish prayers in her head. And then she looked up and focused on the concerned faces of Will and Melissa. "Get out," she said briefly.

"Mrs Studdock," said Melissa desperately, "if I offended you I'm sorry and I . . ." Elizabeth shook her head.

"No," she said softly, "I'm the one who should apologize – I shouldn't have shouted. Neither of you are in trouble and you're not fired. Just . . . I need some time alone," she lied. "Just, take the rest of the day off." The two of them looked uncertain. "I mean it, take the day off – we should do that more often anyway," she gabbled. "If I'm not at work tomorrow, Will, you handle the Treasury, okay?"

Will's face was deadly serious. "If you're not at work tomorrow, I'm calling you," he said firmly. "And if you don't answer I'm coming 'round your house. And if you are not there I'm calling out the caval . . ." Elizabeth shook her head and held out her hands to stop him.

"I'll answer – I'm not about to drive my car off Vauxhall Bridge, Will. No cavalry needed!" She smiled; something that required a great deal of effort. "Seriously, both of you – thank you for your concern, but I'm going to be perfectly fine." They looked at her uncertainly. "Go!" she said urgently. "Go sit in the park, or walk by the river, or whatever young lovers do these days. Go!" The two of them carefully considered each other and her. Will unhooked his earpiece.

"Very well, Mrs Studdock," he said slowly, taking Melissa's hand and leading her out of the office, "But if you need us, you call us, alright?"

Elizabeth was already behind her desk and switching back to Susan Pevensie's IMDB page. "Bye kids!" she called after them as the door closed, "Have fun!" Her smile faded as the outer door clicked shut. She moved the mouse pointer over the _Contact_ and selected it. It took her seconds to enter her credit card information to sign up for the IMDBPro service, and less than a minute for it to be approved.

Susan's agent had an office in London. Something made her skip over the telephone number and move straight to the address.

It was in Belgravia. Less than a mile as the crow flies. Easy enough to walk.

Something made her pick up her keys.

She decided to take the car.


	7. Part I Chapter 3 - Thoughts in a DB9

**Chapter Three : Thoughts in a DB9**

Elizabeth owned the most selfish car in England, an expensive toy. On paper, it was a DB9 coupe, the flagship grand tourer supercar of Aston Martin. On the road, it was more-than-half after-market modifications – not an insignificant number of them carried out by moonlighting Aston engineers. As Elizabeth slid behind the leather steering wheel and into the luxurious bucket seat, she reflected on the innumerable changes that had taken place within her over the last few years.

The car she had left in long-term parking at Heathrow shortly before Christmas 2000 had been an Aston Martin DB7 in British Racing green – a standard, off-the-rack vehicle she had owned since the late 1990s. And the luggage she had left waiting for her in the baggage lockers of Vienna International while she wore the armor of a dead Queen had contained standard, off-the-rack Versace. There had been times when – to her shame, now – she had deliberately let the jackets of her suits swing open, not _just_ to flaunt her (admittedly impressive) curves, but to reveal the genuine Versace labels. The winged Aston badge had always been something she was careful to never let get obscured, either.

And now? Now, it was still Aston and Versace, but her old vestments had given way to bespoke tailoring in white and blue-gray, designed in personal consultation with Donatella herself and accented with six-pointed snowflakes and lace handwoven into the frost-etched fern-pattern that crawled over winter glass.

The car was equally unique – the ice-gray bodywork was mostly carbon-fiber body panels custom-cast by Prodrive, the Oxford-based company that modified the DB9 into their racing variant the DBR9. The engine was an enhanced V12 capable of putting out more than 500bhp, the suspension and braking systems revised to suit "a more spirited driver", and the wheels were custom-forged units in light aluminum-alloy, six-spoked, each with a fine lattice-work of rotationally-symmetrical, organic frost. It would take a keen eye indeed to notice each of the wheels was, very subtly, different.

Neither her clothes nor her car were labeled; the clothes never had them and the car had been de-badged within hours of it leaving the factory. And now Elizabeth – de-badged herself with the loss of her wedding ring – idled the car towards Hyde Park Corner, reflecting as she did so on the exciting uncertainty of the adventure that stretched before her.

Her nervousness and fears had evaporated with the warmth of the V12 and the glutinous bubble of the twin exhausts, and now – as she stopped at the traffic lights at Hyde Park Corner, knowing where she had to turn without having to look – she smiled to herself and tapped the steering wheel in time with the music coming from the stereo system. She could barely keep from pumping her foot on the accelerator pedal, sending the rev counter sliding up in ascending sweeps like fingers on a guitar's fretboard.

For this _was_ exciting – she was a stranger in a strange land, no less so than she had been when she went to Narnia. Or, rather, _was taken_ to Narnia; the difference imposed itself on her consciousness as the difference between Assumption and Ascension. Christ had Ascended under His own power, while Mary had _been_ Assumed.

And so had Elijah, and Enoch . . . and Arthur and Ransom?

For a second, the implications of where she was derailed her train of thought, and it was only the angry blare of a horn behind her that snapped her back into reality, the car into drive, and her thoughts back on track. As she moved through Hyde Park Corner with practiced ease, the purposes for and reasons behind taking humans out of their realities – both in her reality, and this one – churned in her mind.

Were people not lifted from their lives and worlds – perhaps literally, perhaps metaphorically – and placed in unfamiliar and different situations for their own benefit, that they themselves may change for their own betterment, and thence used as instruments of God's Will? She remembered Isaiah, with his tongue and lips sanctified by a live coal from the Altar, and his immediate cry of "Here am I! Send me!"

_Pick up your mat, and walk_.

What had been Narnia if not her own sanctification, her own baptism of fire and water and blood? Had not an Angel burned away her iniquities and cleansed her of her sin by – not bringing the coals to her – but by taking her to the Altar and making her drink of the Chalice? Had not a holy woman of the Lord, a Queen of Narnia and the devoted Handmaid of the Lion, tempered and refined her body like a blade even as her brother had refined her soul?

Was she really foolish enough to think her revelation as she hung off the walls of Narrowhaven - that all she had to do was _enough_ - had been correct and complete? How had she possibly thought the command to be _perfect_ did not include _more than enough_?

_You must be perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect_ – and that Father in Heaven had sent His Son to die and had been infinitely merciful to humanity. He had never said "enough", or felt He had done His part and that – if everyone did that – the world would be perfect.

That was not to say such a theological philosophy was not true; of course, it was – but it was to say, very simply, it wasn't sufficient. It wasn't the way the world worked. Everyone was expected to be more than pious and suffer more than they deserved for those who would never reach piety, or who would never suffer enough. It wasn't fair, but – as Aslan himself had said to Elizabeth as her heart melted to living water – if life were fair, would he have dealt with her so mercifully?

There would be justice when there would be peace; but that war showed no signs of abating. When time had run its course, every valley would be filled in and every mountain would be laid low. Every tongue would be silenced and there would be no-one who would be able to say justice had not been done.

And now, now that she knew that and she accepted it intellectually if not completely, what was she? What had Edmund and Susan and Michael made her into? What had the battles and the struggle and the soul-wrenching joy and grief and the complete reversal and restructuring and rebirth been for if not to make her into a holy child of God? And why, therefore, had she been brought here?

Was she a miracle, as Ransom had been on Perelandra? Was she somehow supposed to be the champion of Christ in this universe? Even with her knowledge that _in persona Christi_ could very well refer to nothing more than a kind word or a correct statement or a charitable act, the enormity of that awareness and its implications made her head spin.

She did not hold out much hope this adventure would be anything but; Isaiah's tongue had been sanctified and he had been made to preach. Her muscle and blood and bone had been toned and honed by war to a weapon of living flesh – the conclusion was inevitable, and only very slightly disconcerting. Something within her rejoiced in the prospect of war.

For, when all was said and done, it was easier to die than to use your head. It was easier to slaughter dragons than to have to persuade and argue and live the white-martyrdom drudgery of a life in a world that told you everything you believed was wrong. In a world where sins wore hideous visages and carried fell weapons, everyone knew what one was (even if they lacked the courage to do anything about it) and everyone cheered when you brought one down. In her world, sins wore purple and gold and so many people loved them and would fight with the weapons of tolerance against you.

In her world. She was at a traffic light again, and that derailed her train of thought just enough to switch the points and have her mind ask the questions she did not really have answers to. Just _where_ was she and, perhaps more to the point, just _who _was she here? Was she truly herself, or had she displaced some other Elizabeth Studdock in this reality? Was this reality even real, or was it merely the England Lewis had written about? She was under no illusions that the England of the chronicles of Narnia might be real; it absolutely wasn't. It was, in every respect, just as unreal as Narnia was.

Of course – she had _been_ to Narnia. That didn't make it any more real.

If this was a fictional universe, then, was she the only real thing in it? Had this universe existed before she came here? Was she taking the place of an alternate version of her, or just a fictional version of her whom Lewis had never written about – because he had died before she was born? Did a story carry on after its creator was dead?

But those musings, she reflected, were better suited for d'Iago than her. And, more to the point, they were irrelevant. She was here now – whomever _she_ and wherever _here_ were. She very probably had a job to do – although she had no idea what it might be. She added up her impressions and knowledge – despite the absence of her wedding ring, it was clear she was married here, and to someone named Studdock. Her father hadn't reacted with puzzlement when she had mentioned the length of time she had been a widow – so that Studdock was probably Thomas and had probably died in the collapse of the WTC. She had a son called Edmund, and everything else about her life seemed to be the same and normal. But she could not trust her memories – for she did not remember things which everyone else seemed to know as simple and obvious facts.

Nor did she retain any knowledge of certain things she had done; Susan's movies were visited links on IMDB. She wondered what else she might not remember simply because she did not know; the notion did not comfort her.

But it was Narnia which tweaked at her mind the most; for it was clear she (that is, the she who had been here before she arrived, if indeed that was the case and that made sense) knew of Narnia and perhaps even her own personal experiences there. Edmund Michael was not a name she or Thomas would have chosen otherwise. The registration number of this car – JAD1S – was not an accident, neither were the name of her company or the snow-and-ice leitmotif on her car and clothes and everything else. Those were identical to her life in the "other world", and she had consciously chosen them precisely because of her experiences in Narnia, a statement of her own transition from Jadis to Swanwhite.

Suddenly, a realization broke into her mind and her heart gave a great leap in her chest. Did that mean, then, that here she was one of the Friends of Narnia? A person drawn into the magical world of Narnia and privy to its secrets? Was she now _truly_ one of those who had experienced Narnia, rather than simply someone to whom it had been a story? For her own experiences had always been colored by the dull knowledge that it was not entirely _real_. But for the she that lived here - had she not experienced Narnia as genuinely as she had, yet without that lingering fly in the ointment? And was not now she that woman?

The gnostic joy of that swept through her with the questioning wonder there might, in fact, be people in the other – purportedly real – world who had read of her adventures, and thought of them as nothing more than stories. And then – as her car pulled to a stop outside the converted Georgian townhouse that was Susan's agent's office – her own mind ground to a disappointed halt. That _was_ the case; _she_ was from the real world, and d'Iago had written that very story with her permission, and many people thought her nothing more than a fiction. The realization the fulfillment of a half-desire had not occasioned the joy she expected made her sensual mouth turn down at the corners as she got out of the car and walked to the door.

She was banking on – firstly – being able to see Susan, or at least finding out where she was. It was entirely possible Susan and she were friends here – for she had certainly been to Narnia, and there was absolutely no reason to think Susan had not. Why would Susan have not made herself known to Elizabeth after Christmas 2000? Would Elizabeth herself not have done just that, finding Susan and renewing a friendship after a few days for her, and a lifetime or more for Susan? As she mounted the stairs to the first-floor office, a thought struck her and she pulled out her 'phone. She quickly cycled through the numbers – there were none she did not recognize, and certainly no Susan or Pevensie.

"Can I help you?" asked the receptionist politely. Elizabeth looked up, to find herself standing in the foyer of well-appointed office, with comfortable chairs, a rack of relatively recent magazines, and pictures of movie stars and other celebrities on the wall. Elizabeth's eye was drawn to the picture of Susan Pevensie, shot in black and white and dressed in what was clearly Lincoln green, her arms taut and her hands busy with bowstring, stave and arrow shaft. Elizabeth smiled her very best businesswoman smile.

"Yes, you can," she said, "My name is Elizabeth Studdock. Can you tell me how I can get hold of Susan Pevensie?" The girl – younger even than Melissa – smiled with an air of condescension and pulled a folder towards her. She riffled thought it, found the page she was looking for, and pulled out a card.

"There's the address for her fan club," she began, "Miss Pevensie does answer some of her mail personally, but . . ." Elizabeth interrupted her.

"No, I'm sorry," she explained, "I didn't make myself clear. I'm an old friend of hers, and I was wanting to get in touch with her." The girl looked at her askance, the twist of her lips clearly giving the impression that she had heard _that_ one before. "She probably knows me by my maiden name, Agnoli." said Elizabeth.

"I can't give out any of our clients' personal information, madam," the girl said in a semi-bored tone. "If you want to contact her, you will have to do it via her fan club."

"Can I leave a message for her here?" asked Elizabeth, a very slight edge of silver appearing in her tone. The receptionist shook her head.

"I'm sorry," she said in a tone which suggested she was anything but, "but that is against our policy. Like I say, if you want to contact her you'll have to go through her fan club." She pushed the card towards her again, as if it were a ticket out of her presence. Elizabeth sighed and tried again.

"Yes, thank you for that," she said with infinite patience, "but I wanted to be able to speak with her personally. I am a very old friend of hers." The receptionist sighed, and finally looked Elizabeth directly in the eyes.

"Look," she said – not unreasonably, "there are a lot of very old friends of lots of our clients who come 'round here. I can't give you her personal details, and I can't take a message for her. Even if I could, she doesn't just come waltzing into the office on a daily basis, you know?" She smiled a superior smile that Elizabeth couldn't help but let get under her skin. Elizabeth gritted her teeth, was about to snap a response, when she remembered a favorite phrase of d'Iago's when dealing with obstinate lackeys;

_I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over the jangling of this enormous bag of money!_ She sighed, and began to reach for her purse, but was stopped when the door behind her crashed open and a slender figure with long ebony hair streaked with silver just came waltzing into the office and swept the room with piercing green eyes.

"Hello, Elizabeth," said Susan Pevensie.


	8. Pt I Ch 4 - By the Rivers of Babylondon

**Chapter Four : By the River of Babylondon**

The warm and slightly disbelieving smile of welcoming meeting stole over Elizabeth's face as she stepped towards Susan, her hands extended. The older woman – how strange that was to acknowledge! - took her hands in hers and smiled down at her.

For there was absolutely no doubt Susan was older than Elizabeth - by at least two whole generations, despite the fact when she had last seen her she had been young enough to be her daughter. She was still beautiful – and to even say that was to give voice to the ridiculous notion age might have withered her aesthetic charms rather than simply maturing them. Certainly, she was not the boyish-figured girl who had dived from the cliff of the Cair, nor was she the fuller-figured woman who appeared in the photograph on the wall – she was who and what she was now; it was her admission and acceptance of that which meant she was still beautiful.

_As is_, Elizabeth supposed, as the two women stared into each other's eyes for an endless moment, _the case for me._ There was something entirely exquisite about Elizabeth which had not been there before Narnia, and which she had first noticed when she was bathing in Susan's private chamber. That had not been a case of some sort of Jovian-bride's bath; an elixir of beauty which the Gentle-Queen had deigned to share with her (for a Queen with access to such a spring would be anything but gentle – as Juno herself had been), but merely an accident of temporal proximity. Even in the wake of a soul-shattering conversion, one tended to notice one's beauty when naked.

Elizabeth had come to accept her beauty need not be that of a little girl when she was no longer one, but the intervening years of physical if not emotional womanhood has been increasingly cruel until she learned to live within herself and accept – not her own limitations – but her own presence-defining boundaries. She was the same person she had been then, but – just as she had grown from a single fertilized egg to a fetus to an infant to a child to an adolescent to an adult and thence to a mother and part of a family – her existence was possessed of different boundaries. She had learned to respect them and live within them – and, even, to live _up to_ them – slightly too late to enjoy the early years of her growth. She wondered when Susan might have come to that realization.

For Elizabeth was under no illusions about what what had happened to Susan; when she had returned from Narnia she had buried herself in the books, re-reading those her aunt had read to her and which she had read before she decided to put away her childish things, and then ploughing on with the final two. The denouement and climax of _The Last Battle _had been a shock to her, and she had cried and even – until she realized the illogic and unnecessity of it – prayed for their souls. But she had still found herself – even though it directed energy from her other prayers – praying for Susan.

She had indulged – briefly, until the theological liberality and juvenile, selfish idiocy of it got too much for her to stand – in online discussion over how unfair and misogynistic Lewis had been to Susan. But even in the earlier part of the discussions she had realized the truth of the matter wasn't what most of those talking about it thought it was.

Theirs was a failure to understand, very simply, two things; _what_ had happened to Susan and _why_ it had happened. A perception that Susan had been barred from Narnia, and barred out of spite or sexist hatred by some cruel, rapacious, dumbly-masculine Lion.

The initial objections were mostly based on the theory Aslan hated mature femininity; a charge that might very well be true if your definition of mature femininity was the one Elizabeth herself had held for so many years – what Lewis himself had called rushing to get to the silliest point in one's life as quickly as possible and then trying to stay there as long as possible. The fact Lewis put those words in the mouth of a mature woman did not appear to deny the notion he hated adult femininity in his detractors' minds.

But there were more insidious views, ones which came from those aware of Lewis' own beliefs but who did not hold them; both from those who did not hold them at all, and from those who thought they held the true versions of those beliefs. The notion that lipsticks and nylons and invitations would be enough to keep one from Heaven was alien to their minds, perhaps for the same reason the notion that feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and giving drink to the thirsty would be enough to keep you out of Hell was equally alien to their theology. Both positions neglected to take into account the motives and reasons behind the two sets of actions, and were unable to see deeds were the most obvious results of beliefs and people would probably be judged on works before faith.

There were even those who understood what Lewis had said and denied it, not through a denial of its truth, but rather by a rejection of what he had stood for. "Well," they said, "if that's what it takes to be a good Christian, then I'll have nothing to do with it!"

All of these positions failed to understand what happened to Susan; for, as d'Iago had pointed out to her when she had asked, Lewis never said what _did_ happen to Susan, but rather what did _not_. Susan was not in the New Narnia – first and foremost – because she was not dead. D'Iago had not neglected, of course, to inform her there was no certainty Susan would have gone to the New Narnia had she been standing on that train platform; but d'Iago had also made her aware there was no such thing as eternal assurance. There had been, however, most definitely a careful continuum of certainties even in his expression of divine uncertainty.

Towards the end of her time participating in these discussions, she had chosen to attempt to explain the truth of the matter. Her statement – in response to a forum-member's refusal to accept what had happened to Susan – that _it had already happened_ had earned her a vitriolic response from a shockingly liberal Christian with a grounding in theology that was shaky even for sand. "It is too much," he had asked her, "that you feel sorry for her and want those who are punishing her to stop? How very _Christian_ of you." He had added, almost as an afterthought, "Sarcasm, for those of you too thick to figure it out." Privately, Elizabeth had wondered if he really knew what sarcasm was, as – judging by his other comments on the forums – this was his actual view. Elizabeth's response had been swift and decisive.

_Firstly_, she had typed, _all of these answers assume Susan didn't get what she deserved and – as hard as it is for me to admit it, absolutely positively and definitely yes she did._

_ Punishment implies someone did it to her – which is categorically not the case. Susan did it to herself – she made the choices she made, but wasn't punished by anyone. She, very simply, chose to no longer believe in Narnia. Aslan never said, "Hey, you are more concerned with lipstick than me! So burn!" No, Susan said – when others said "Let's talk about Narnia!" - "I don't want to."_

_ This isn't a case of her making a choice and someone punishing her for it, this is a case of her making a choice and getting what she wanted. It's the difference between a child being naughty and not being allowed cake, and that same child saying she won't have any cake._

_ Lewis made it very clear it wasn't the end of Susan, but it was the end of Narnia. Susan didn't die – are you all so spiritual that not dying is a punishment now?_

_ So, to answer your sarcastic question; no, wishing people who are punishing others would turn the cheek isn't too much for me. But, then again, nothing was DONE to Susan. Nothing at all. She wasn't killed in a train crash, she wasn't forced to forget Narnia, no-one put a gun to her head and said "Wear lipstick"._

_ Susan made a choice – she made one whose consequences YOU don't like. She thought it worth it. In just the same way Jadis made the choice to leap the wall and not go through the gate, Susan made her choices._

_ What you are all complaining about is that you don't think her choice was that bad, and the consequences were unfair._

_ You are all forgetting what she did – she turned her back on Narnia. It's not what she said "Yes" to (nylons and lipstick), but what she said "No" to (Aslan and Narnia) that made her life bad._

_ But punished her? No – no-one did that. She's not a victim – she wasn't in Narnia because she chose not to be, not because someone said she couldn't come._

Writing those words had taken it out of Elizabeth – not only because they meant she had to actually face what had happened to the best friend she had ever had, but because they did not address the deeper theological concern none of those posting their merry little happy, liberal, "God is a rainbow" theology had addressed. That Susan was, despite the fact she was probably a very lovely girl and the life of the party and being a little immature wasn't enough to keep you out of Heaven, probably going straight to Hell. Lewis had either made her or knew everything about her, and she was categorically missing the mark by a few vital inches at the very least. She had said "No" to Aslan and – based on the conversation between the Lion and Edmund at the end of _The Voyage of the Dawn Treader_ – that meant she was probably consciously saying "No" to God. And the only way back from that choice was to reverse it.

When had she reversed that choice, if indeed she had? She had certainly come to the realization her youth was transitory but her beauty was not; but there were probably entire caverns of Hell filled with people whose torment was knowing no matter how beautiful they thought their bodies, their souls were vile. And the fact Susan was active in the Church wasn't a certainty of salvation; wasn't Hell paved with the skulls of bishops?

Suddenly, something stuck Elizabeth with the clarity of a bell – prior to her conversion, she had always assumed the concept of a spiritual war was just that; a spiritual struggle against one's own tendency to sin. It had not been until Narnia the concept of an _actual_ war, with actual casualties, had entered her mind. Even if such an idea only existed in Narnia and the worlds of the Cosmic Trilogy, it showed the concept was at least valid. She had come into this world expecting – knowing, rather – she would be engaged in the spiritual struggle that in her own world was nothing more than resisting temptations and trying to be perfect, but here was actual warfare; muscles and guts and blades and bone. The realization her appearance here might be for the purpose of redeeming Susan and bringing her back to the folds of Christ's love without any violence was somewhat depressing for her; not just because it lacked excitement, but because – when all was said and done – it _was _easier to die than use your head.

And so she smiled into Susan's beautiful face and breathed with unremitting joy, "Susan, it's good to see you again. It's been too long."

Susan smiled back. "Long enough – for those who love, time is not." Behind them, the receptionist coughed.

"Miss Pevensie? Miss Pevensie?" she was asking. "This . . . lady . . . was here for you, I gave her . . ." Susan interrupted her.

"Yes, Mary-Sue, that will be all. Thank you." Elizabeth might have smirked at the put-down the snooty receptionist got, but she was distracted by Susan's hands on hers. She was gripping the base of Elizabeth's two ring-fingers with her index fingers and thumbs, the digits on her right hand gently twisting her Notre Dame class ring and those on the left resting where her wedding ring should have been. "So," said Susan, "it really is you." She let go of Elizabeth's hands and reached into a pocket of her jacket, pulling out a small jewelery box – old, and with the felt nap rubbed off the corners. Elizabeth saw the golden shamrocks on Susan's own class ring gleam on her hand as she opened the box and presented it to Elizabeth. "This is yours," said Susan, as Elizabeth unbelievingly took her platinum and black diamond wedding ring from the box.

There was no mistaking it for anything else – the small imperfections of the inclusions in the diamond were unique, and engraved on the inside was the inscription which she had only noticed when she took the ring off for the first time after getting married; when she scrubbed blood and soot from her fingers after 9/11. _Making up for lost time_.

Disbelievingly, Elizabeth slipped the ring onto her finger. "How did you . . . ?" she began. Susan smiled.

"You gave me it," she said softly, "for just this moment." Susan raised her wrist – she was wearing a watch that Elizabeth recognized; the same style as her own, radio-synchronized with the atomic-clock driven signal from Rugby. "Come on, I haven't got much time. Let's take your car."

There was something indefinably commanding about Susan – when she had been the young Queen of Narnia part of Elizabeth had thought the air that commanded obedience blew from her crown, but now she saw it was simply something intrinsic to Susan. She had always been taller than Elizabeth, but the years since they had known each other and her perfect slender posture lent her more height. There was a pinched, ever-so-slightly weathered look to her skin and face, and her movements were careful and deliberate – she was, reflected Elizabeth with wonder – nearly eighty years old. There were wrinkles in her skin, crows' feet and laughter lines at the corner of her eyes. Her skin had lost some of its luster and her hair was far grayer than Elizabeth's own wrought-iron. Her hands were beginning to show the bones and tendons, and her voice wasn't the liquid diamond that a thousand Narnian princes had dreamed they would wake to. But her eyes were as brilliant and sharp as ever, and her smile as ready and as gentle.

And so Elizabeth followed Susan to street level without question or objection, watching Susan take the stairs carefully and one at a time with her hand firmly gripping the banister. The two of them stepped out into the bright autumn sunshine – parked neatly behind the DB9 was a black Mercedes S-class. As the two of them approached, a powerful figure dressed in a black uniform stepped smartly from the car and opened the rear door for them, raising his gloved hand to the brim of his peaked cap. "Miss Pevensie," he said deferentially, "Mrs Studdock." Susan smiled at him and patted his cheek.

"Thank you, Neil," she said, "we'll be taking Elizabeth's car." Neil nodded smartly.

"Just as you say, Miss Pevensie." She gestured towards the boot of the car.

"Can I have the package, please?" Neil nodded again, shut the door and swiftly moved to the rear of the car. He was light on his feet for such a big man – Elizabeth was reminded of fullbacks she had know. He took a long white cardboard box tied with a red ribbon from the boot. It seemed to be fairly heavy as he handed it to Susan.

"Will that be all, Miss Pevensie?" he asked. She nodded. "Where would you like me to wait?" Something seemed to catch in Susan's throat as he said that.

"That's . . . that's alright, Neil. I'll . . ." She paused, and then began again. "You're a very good driver, Neil – and a great friend." She put her free hand on his head and drew him towards her, kissing his brow. "Go with God," she whispered, slipping a letter into the pocket of his immaculate uniform. Neil pulled back, uncertain and reaching into his pocket – but Susan was already walking briskly towards the rear of Elizabeth's car.

Elizabeth popped the boot and Susan lay the package – about three-feet long, eight inches wide and a hand's-breadth deep – next to the monogrammed luggage always kept there for international emergencies. Elizabeth shut the boot and quickly walked around to the passenger side of the car, opening the door for Susan and offering her a helping hand in. With only a slight wince as her old bones creaked, Susan slid in to the bucket seat. Elizabeth shut the door and quickly walked around to the driver's side, getting into the car and starting the engine. It came alive with the angry roar of a jet fighter eager for the off. She turned to Susan.

Her mind was full of wonder and amazement; now they were alone in a little bubble of glass and carbon fiber, all the questions and excited greetings wanted to pour from her. But when she looked over at Susan she saw a woman who was trying very hard to hang onto whatever shreds of bravery the universe had deigned to leave her, sapphire tears beading in her emerald eyes. She folded her hands in her lap and looked upwards; the action of a woman who does not want her tears to spoil her mascara. "Over Vauxhall Bridge," she said in a quavering voice, "just to the west of the SIS Building is a little bistro called the Torchwood. I like it; we'll go there." Elizabeth politely inclined her head and put the car into drive, edging it out into traffic and moving south.

Elizabeth gulped, said a quick prayer under her breath, and took her courage in her hands. "Susan," she began as they stopped at a set of traffic lights, "I . . . I know what happened. With your family. I know you turned away from Narnia, and things were probably very difficult for you, but . . ." Susan raised a hand and stopped her, her eyes locked on the bustling life of London outside the car.

"It's too late, Elizabeth," she said with an air of sadness. Elizabeth gritted her teeth, and practically snapped at her.

"It's _never_ too late, Susan! Never!" she said desperately. "You can always come back! Always!" Angrily, she leaned on the horn and whiplashed the car through a space that was only wide enough by an inch. Susan smiled and turned to face her.

"You misunderstand," she said gently, her face lit with a seraphic smile, placing her hand lovingly on Elizabeth's lying on the gear stick, "it's too late because it's already been done. I've just come from Confession and Mass at Immaculate Conception – I had Neil follow you to the office." She paused and smiled again. "You brought me back, Elizabeth – thank you. I will never forget that."

Elizabeth's head was spinning. "What? How?" she asked. "When?"

Susan's hand was still on hers, she tapped her wedding ring with one long fingernail. "How do you think I got your wedding ring?" she asked, as the long, lean car growled over the five steel arches of Vauxhall Bridge, moving towards the ziggurat-style Secret Intelligence Service Building known to the locals as _Babylon-on-Thames_. Beside and underneath them, the silent-bronze female figures representing the arts and sciences set into the arch supports rolled past the car. Old Father Thames gurgled beneath them, moving on his perpetual march towards the North Sea. Elizabeth sighed and shook her head, opening her mouth to speak. But Susan was pointing the way to a little cafe-bar beside the River with a few tables outside shaded by patio umbrellas, overshadowed by the looming bulk of the SIS Building. "You can park there," said Susan.

Almost before Elizabeth had put the transmission into park, Susan was out of the car – moving with a sprightly speed which surprised Elizabeth – and opening the boot, taking the package out. As Elizabeth got out of the car, Susan was beckoning a waiter over. He directed her to a table next to the railings by the River. Elizabeth, following in her wake, heard her order a gin and tonic as she sat down and rested the package against the railings.

"I'm just going to go to the bathroom," Elizabeth said quietly, putting her 'phone and purse down on the table. Susan, reaching into her handbag for a book, looked at her watch.

"Yes," she said distractedly, "I think we have time."

In the bathroom, Elizabeth splashed her face with water and gripped the edge of the sink as she stared into the mirror. What _was_ she doing here? She didn't have to save Susan – apparently, she'd already done that. And given her her wedding ring to boot. Susan had expected her to be there – suddenly, the notion she might know Susan in this world became a difficulty and an annoyance. Was she expected to be able to function in a world where she did not know everything that she had done? Were there years of friendship and contact she simply didn't have access to? She couldn't even remember doing the thing that had touched Susan more than anything else – what else might she not know? "Dear Lord," she prayed, "help me with my impatience." She had wanted to pray for knowledge, but her subconscious prayers were often a lot closer to what she needed than her conscious wants.

She left the bathroom and walked to the table. Susan had ordered a cappuccino for her. She nodded her thanks, sat down, and sipped it judiciously. She opened her mouth to speak, but Susan held up her her hand in a gesture of benediction or a request for silence. She bent her head to the small leather-bound Bible open on the table before her.

"_My soul magnifies the Lord,_" Susan read softly,  
"_And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,  
for He has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden . . .  
for He who is mighty has done great things for me,  
and holy is His name._" She sighed and closed the book, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord," she said softly, "let it be done unto me according to your word." There was a silent pause during which Elizabeth gathered what remained of her courage.

"Susan," she began tentatively, "I don't remember any of . . . I don't remember bringing you back to God, I don't remember giving you my wedding ring." She paused, looking into Susan's kind, compassionate, utterly loving gaze. "I'm not . . . I'm not the Elizabeth Studdock from this world, Susan. This world's . . . a fictional world to me. I don't remember any of the things you say I've done." Susan smiled back at her.

"You remember Narnia, don't you?" Elizabeth smiled at the memory.

"Edmund's crusade to the Lone Islands, the battle of Glasswater, our conversation." She nodded, "Yes, I remember that." Susan laughed brightly and took a deep pull at her G&T.

"The reason you don't remember most of these things, Elizabeth, is not because you are from some world where you never did them – but because you haven't done them yet." Elizabeth blinked once or twice and her mind whirled. Susan sighed. "Look, I don't claim to understand the nature of who you are or which one of us is real – if either of us are. You redeemed me in 1949, you gave me your ring a few years later."

"I was born in 1964," said Elizabeth with the flat air of a woman to whom logic has just shown itself to be of little account. Susan shrugged.

"And I was born in 1928, and I was a teenager when we met in Narnia." She grinned. "I wouldn't set too much stock by the notion of time, if I were you. One rather gets the impression its negotiable."

Elizabeth passed her hand over her brow – she wished Susan had ordered her a G&T of her own. "You mean, I'm going to go back in time, in this world that is fictional to me, and you remember things I haven't done yet?" A thought struck her. "I came to Narnia in 2000, why didn't you make yourself known to me after then? I can understand not coming to see me before, but . . ." Susan leaned forward, interrupting her.

"Because it wasn't _you_," she said firmly. "It was the you from here, not the you from there. That's . . ." She threw up her hands. "Look, I can't explain it – I'm not sure I understand it myself." She sighed. "And . . . I didn't want to put you in danger." At Elizabeth's surprised look, she smiled deprecatingly. "I've been involved in a lot more than is printed in my fan club's newsletter ."

Visions of a Saint Anne's style resistance to the N.I.C.E. or its successor stole through Elizabeth's mind, of Susan fighting for the Narnian side even if there wasn't any Narnia any more. She reached out and held her old hand in both of hers. "And I'm going to be involved in that, aren't I? Or I have been, or whatever." Susan cast her emerald eyes down.

"There's a lot of difficulty and . . . horror ahead of you," she said quietly. "A lot of very hard things for you to do. Some of them we will do together, but in the hardest things you will be opposed by me." She fumbled in her pocket for a handkerchief and furiously dabbed at her eyes. "And I'm so sorry for that, because it wasn't me . . . and yet it was. And you still came back for me, after everything I did and you saw me do." She buried her head in her hands and sniffled and sobbed for a second, dark tracks of mascara smearing over her cheeks. And then she mastered herself and raised her tear-streaked face, setting her jaw and looking at her watch.

"About a minute," she sniffed briskly. She reached for the package by her side and simply swept it onto the table, scattering glasses and napkins and silverware onto the floor in a tide of tinkling metal and shattering glass. As heads spun at the surprising impropriety of it all, Susan shoved the box towards Elizabeth. Reaching for it and looking at her watch at the same time, Elizabeth's face was all confusion. "Remember," Susan said with aching compassion, "death doesn't mean God hates us, even if it's not us who die. I have always been your friend, and I wish I could repay you for what you saved me from."

Elizabeth had opened the lid of the box now, and she reached inside, unbelievingly feeling the smooth, oily coldness of what could only be the pistol grip of a rifle. She leaned forward, opening the lid further, taking in the strange curves and lines of an outlandish weapon gleaming in chromed steel and Bakelite. The barrel ended in a perfect sphere from which protruded a small cylinder, and the whole gun seemed to be cast in a single piece. Her hand curled automatically around the grip of what looked – categorically – like nothing more than a ray-gun, her index finger sliding onto the smooth trigger even as her thumb found what could only be the safety.

And then the tall figure in the motorcycle leathers and with the black visor of his helmet down over his face stepped behind Susan and reached behind her chair, a weird clicking and metallic rattling coming from somewhere, almost as if robotic scorpions or centipedes were moving inside that leather suit.

And then Susan jerked forward, blood fountaining from her mouth as a forest of razor-sharp segmented metallic worms burst from her chest as the figure shoved what had been masquerading as a hand and arm through her back, flaying her from the inside out. Elizabeth screamed and snatched the gun into her arms, standing and kicking the table over and flicking the safety to "off".

And then all Hell broke loose.

**A / n : **Okay, another update! This has been a little rushed, but I wanted to get it down and the story forward – people are wanting action without too much philosophy! So, the philosophy is a cursory pass – I may update it later – but now we have proper sci-fi action!

The SIS Building and Vauxhall Bridge are real places in London – you can find links to pages about them from the _Redemption of Sulva_ page in my profile, or by checking out Wikipedia.

Susan's prayer is the _Magnificat_ – the prayer of the Blessed Virgin Mary on visiting her cousin Elizabeth. It can be found in the first chapter of Luke – the text is taken from the RSV(CE) "Ignatius" Bible.


	9. Ch 5 - Through the Rush-Hour with Love

**Chapter Five : Through the Rush-Hour with Love**

Whatever was masquerading as a humanoid figure discarded the pretense with the same ease and casual awfulness as it did Susan's corpse. The body that slumped to the ground had been ravaged from the inside out by burrowing gatherings of metallic tentacles, each about a finger's-width in diameter and tipped with a snapping lamprey mouth studded with gleaming teeth. The thick motorcycle leathers were shredding into tattered fringes of desiccated flesh as the masses of writhing appendages disentangled themselves, unplaiting themselves with deadly determination.

The monstrosity – for to call it a creature would deny the general meaning of the word, although not the literal truth for it had clearly been created – that flung itself at Elizabeth was a nightmarish horror drawn from the mad dreams of an inhuman intellect. Bizarrely and almost comically, it was still wearing the black motorcycle helmet on what she assumed was its head, but the rest of its clothes were torn to shredded ruin. Its limbs and body had been formed of a solid mass of intertwined, knotted segmented metal tentacles, binding themselves together to create the illusion of arms and legs, unwrapping into individuality to mock fingers inside the gloves. Now, that illusion was gone – descending from the neck of the helmet was a writhing mass that floated in a billowing cloud of gleaming movement, clattering as servos moved the individual tubular segments of the tentacles. The thing was floating in the air, a weird howling hum and ozone-tasting charge of static in the air offering the only explanation how. Abruptly, it gathered its tentacles into a sort of sweeping cone and thrust itself – squidlike – towards Elizabeth.

She was already leaping back, trying to bring the gun to bear, but by the time she did it was inside the arc of the end of the barrel. Rather than try to jump backwards again in order to get a shot in – because she had no certain idea of what lay behind her and suspected she had nowhere to go – she slid her hand onto the base of the stock and slammed the butt of the rifle across the visor of the helmet with the full weight of her shoulder behind it.

The blow knocked it back – it was hovering in the air and there seemed to be little anchoring it in place – and shattered the plexiglas of the visor, smashing the helmet from its head. The thing buzzed madly and propelled itself towards her again, its head now revealed to be a gleaming steel sphere encrusted with lenses that dilated madly, reflecting and refracting the light in confusing ways.

It swept for her, its tentacles reaching for her and wrapping around her chest, its head sticking out like some obscene steel tumor from her ribcage. The writhing mass of metal constricted her breathing, but the thing did not have the strength she feared it might – she raised her arms above her head and slammed the butt of the gun into its cranium, shattering some of the lenses with a tinkling of glass.

The grip on her chest gave, and she smashed it again, denting the metal ball and sending the thing crashing to the ground. A third blow and the sphere cracked along some hidden seam, splitting into two beaten and crushed halves. Inside the shell was something seamed and ridged and folded like a walnut; a dull gray lump of gristly tissue with fine wires connecting it to the inside of the armored sphere. As Elizabeth watched, the flesh began to smoke and rot as the air reached it, the thing writhing and jerking like an octopus connected to a battery, relays shorting out in a shower of sparks.

Around Elizabeth, people were starting to their feet, gasping and screaming in horror. The table at which Elizabeth and Susan had sat was lying on the floor, the crimson-stained cloth half-covering Susan's savaged body, blood mingling with dark coffee and some vile purplish ichor leaking from the shattered cranium of the writhing, jerking thing. Elizabeth kicked the twitching cyborg horror into the soupy waters of the Thames with disgust.

Underneath the screams and and panicked shouts, Elizabeth could hear that weird humming and still smell the charge of ozone in the air. She spun, raising the rifle to her shoulder, and pressed the trigger. Her target – one of the hideous metallic floating squids lashing its forest of tentacles like an anemone – was about fifteen yards away. The coruscating bolt of blue-white energy crackling with chained lightning spat from the crystal at the end and impacted precisely with the brain-case of the thing. The noise the gun made – a high-pitched plosive sound - would have been comic had it not been for the awful, dreadful seriousness of the situation. The air around her turned thicker with ionization and she felt her hair begin to go light with the static electricity.

As the thing spasmed backwards, a neat hole drilled in its gleaming cranium and with all its legs folded up like a dead spider, the gun in Elizabeth's hand jerked slightly; some spring had worked inside the mechanism and a cylinder about the size of a lipstick jumped from an ejector port. Worked into a once-white bakelite panel on the butt were two rows of five tiny portholes, each backed in the same color. With a _snap_, one of them turned black. Elizabeth could smell charred insulation from the round the gun had ejected – a capacitor, no doubt.

Elizabeth had no time to take notes, or to grieve. Bursting out of the Thames, trailing river-slime, were more of the things. Still more were shredding and shedding motorcycle leathers and clattering towards her. She spun around, the gun held easily in her arms – they pretty much had her surrounded. They stopped a few yards from her, jerking back and forth, their eye-lenses dilating and contacting with a whir of servos, their claws clacking open and shut with the irregular noise of a relay-driven telephone exchange. One of them – it was impossible to tell which – buzzed at another. In _Latin_.

"_It is the mother of the Prophecy. Do we proceed?_" And then another buzzed back;

"_Of course. She is only human._"

As one, they jumped towards her. She rolled to the right, cradling the gun in her arms, saving her ammunition. She met those to her right before they were perhaps expecting her, reaching as she stood up and grabbing a handful of tentacles. Somewhere, the sharp, unromantic cracking report of a more traditional gun echoed across the river and bounced from the high walls of the ziggurat. _Of course_, Elizabeth mused through gritted teeth, _British intelligence is going to have police placed around its headquarters – and they aren't going to like squidy things any more than I do._ She snarled and jerked her hand down, ignoring the tentacles that had wrapped around her wrist and forearm. The thing – weaker by far than she had expected – crashed into the concrete floor, its lenses shattering and metallic body denting.

The grip on her arm slackened, even as more segmented worms wrapped around her thighs, some coming horrifying close to some hideous probing. She jammed the barrel of the rifle single handed against one of the red eye-lenses of the thing grabbing her legs and pulled the trigger. Its head just exploded in a shower of boiling metal and vaporized nervous tissue even as she swung the other like a mace, smashing two others aside.

One of them had its appendages wrapped firmly around her neck, its lamprey mouths at the end of them reaching for her eyes and nose. She spat a curse, placed her left hand against the forest of carbuncled eyes and shoved hard. The creature didn't have the strength to resist her – pathetic, weak, flimsy things these metallic squids were – and its shiny brain-case squealed with deforming metal as she jammed it between two wrought-iron railings. Immediately, the thing stopped trying to grab her and wrapped its tentacles around the fence, trying to extricate itself. She shot it through the face.

The urgent drilling noise of submachine-guns set on three-round bursts echoed over the plaza; two police officers wearing black hard-shell armor were standing solidly, guns to their shoulders, picking targets, aiming, taking them down, repeating. There was something refreshing and elegant about their actions; clean, professional, dedicated. Elizabeth raised the rifle to her shoulder again and blasted another two of the things out of the sky with three shots.

Thick, bloodstained silence corrupted with the moans of the injured fell.

She paused, taking stock of the situation – aside from a few twitching ends of tentacles vanishing behind buildings and darting down back alleys, "living" assailants were nowhere to be seen. At her feet and strewn over the floor were fragments of twitching metal and a few smoking hunks of desiccated, air-burned tissue. There were a few people lying on the ground screaming or whimpering, not a few of them nursing injuries – one or two bullet wounds, but most of them burrowing gouges or slashes across soft tissue. The two police offers leveled the anonymous mouths of their guns at her.

"Drop the gun!" one of them shouted. "Drop the gun and put your hands on your head!"

Elizabeth was about to do no such thing – there were enemies about, and they needed all the weapons they could get. She certainly wasn't a professional shot, but she had learned the basics during her sophomore year, and then had the polish put on during grouse and pheasant hunts, and even a few big game safaris, during the excess of the '80s. She could certainly hold her own – and she doubted there were many women with as much of a knowledge of hand-to-hand combat with monsters as her in the country. She shook her head. "Officer, you need my help! Those things are still around."

"Drop the gun, ma'am!" he shouted, as if he had not heard her. "Drop the gun _now!_" Elizabeth was about to argue, when something happened that required something more decisive.

"Officer!" she shouted urgently, "Behind you!" He ignored her, choosing instead to re-settle the gun against his shoulder. His partner turned, saw what Elizabeth had seen, and yelled a warning.

It came too late – the creature crawling up behind him wrapped a couple of tentacles around the grip of the pistol in the hip holster and snapped it open with a couple more. Using his body as a shield, it whipped the gun clear with a fluid grace and – flicking the safety off and chambering a round with more of its innumerable appendages – raised the gun and shot him through the back of the head.

The bullet exited the bridge of his nose in a welter of brain and bone fragments. Even as he slumped Elizabeth shot at the creature, but her shot burned through his shoulder before it hit metal and it only lost a few tentacles. His partner opened up with a three-round burst, but the haze of blood in the air spoiled his aim and then the pistol spoke again and he collapsed to the floor, clutching vainly at his hemorrhaging leg. From nowhere, a virtual tide of the creatures pounced on him, their boring tentacles burrowing their way into his eyes and throat. He died screaming within seconds.

Elizabeth had three shots left – she used two blowing the wounded creature with the pistol out of the air, and then shot into the writhing mass of flashing metal once more. Her next shot felt like playing with a toy ray-gun when the D-cell batteries have died. She tossed the gun down, snatched her keys from her pocket and turned and ran for her car. Behind her, the tangle of mechanical squids unraveled themselves from the corpses, four of them now carrying some sort of gun and each with an attendant squid carrying the spare ammunition the police had been wearing.

Elizabeth hit the autostart button and the engine roared into life as she frantically sprinted for the DB9. As she drew near it, she heard the splatter of automatic fire chew up the ground behind her heels and felt something wrap around her left hand as she pumped it behind her, trying to make her legs work faster. She reached the driver's door, realized that one of the things was wrapped around her forearm and that its grinding teeth were gouging tracks into her clothes and flesh. She wrenched the door open and thrust her hand between it and the jam. She slammed the door shut twice, hard, and the thing twitched and spasmed. She shook it off her hand and threw herself into the driver's seat, slamming the gear stick into drive and pressing the accelerator to the floor. The door banged against the twisted jam as she sped away, spraying gravel behind her.

She risked a glance in the rear view mirror – there was a small horde of the things following her, the two with the submachine-guns deftly and swiftly reloading even as the two with the pistols emptied their magazines at her. She winced and ducked as a bullet crazed the rear window. A split second later the drumming clatter of full-auto fire turned the window to confetti and sprayed the inside of the car with cubes of safety-glass. She winced and kept her head down and her foot to the floor.

Experimentally, she flexed her fingers and clenched her muscles – nothing broken, but there were rips in her clothes and skin, blood leaking onto the leather of her upholstery. Beside her, the door flapped back and forth, unable to close against the damaged jam.

The things – she had absolutely no idea what they were, nor why they spoke Latin, nor why they wanted to kill her – were closing on her. The other cars that were getting in her way were checking her speed, forcing her to swerve around them, sometimes smashing into them and sending them skidding off the road. One of her pursuers squirted itself forward, wrapping its tentacles around the door frame and pushing them into the car, steel lamprey mouths flickering over her shoulder and hair.

She snarled a curse, saw that more of them were grabbing onto the car, and hauled the wheel to the side. The heavy car drifted through a sharp curve, and she just let the machine slide – slamming itself against a wall with a rending crash of steel and stone. The thing was trapped between the DB9 and the building, its head being crushed and smoking fragments of diseased brain splattering over the window. The door crunched shut with an ugly noise, a few severed tentacles left twitching spasmodically inside the car.

Others had latched themselves onto the car by now, a few of them shoving themselves through the shattered rear window, others wrapping themselves around the wing mirrors or sneaking under the engine and transmission. She snarled as the ones with the guns leveled their weapons at her, slamming the accelerator to the metal. The car howled, something under the bonnet screaming as one of the things caught in a belt or piston or whatever, and it jerked forward as hot lead splattered against the bodywork and glass. Behind her, the things that had crawled into the car clattered out of it as she accelerated away – only one that had managed to wrap a tentacle around the passenger-side headrest staying inside.

She had one goal in mind – a goal informed by the fact the things had identified her as _mater oraculum_; to get to Edmund Michael and protect him, if she possibly could. He spent Monday mornings at a pre-school group at Immaculate Conception. She hauled the wheel to the right, turning north onto Vauxhall Bridge. The car drifted, the engine braking coming later than she had expected, and she slammed broadside into a white van. Glass and coachwork shattered and creaked, scattering fragments over the tarmac surface of the road. The windscreen of the car crazed and partially cracked, one corner popping free.

There were screams and chaos on the roads now – glass and oil mingling on the hot black surface, cars spinning out and crashing into the railings on either side of the bridge. There were sirens in the air – the flashing blue lights and two-tone howling that demanded attention. Elizabeth braced her arms against the wheel and shot out onto the bridge proper, the Thames churning underneath her.

The things clinging to her car were pushing their tentacles under the bonnet now, into the fissures that had opened up where the bodywork was twisted from the impacts of other cars into hers. She watched with dismay as pieces of wire were pulled from the engine, a few torn lengths of hose and oil-black pieces of metal. The things almost seemed to be mocking her as they writhed around, as if displaying the guts of her car as macabre trophies.

Ahead of her, the bridge was blocked by an athwart panda car – a wall of black and white bodywork and flashing blue light. Two policemen crouched behind the vehicle, heavy bullpup rifles in their hands. For a split second, she wondered what to do – and even if she would have enough time to actually stop before she barreled into the roadblock.

And then the bonnet of her car popped up, some latch forced by the forest of tentacles exploring her car's innards. Next to her, the thing twittered and buzzed excitedly as it reached for her face, even as she heard the guns open up with a metallic staccato bark.

She swore expansively, grabbing the thing by the base of its tentacles, her forearm jammed into the writhing mass of metal worms, and reached for the hand brake. With a quick prayer, she punched the thing into the already weakened glass of the windscreen and pulled the brake lever as hard as she could, dropping her shoulder and closing her eyes.

The car abruptly slowed with a howl of brakes and the smoking smell of burnt metal. The metallic head of the monster saved her hand from being cut to ribbons as it plunged through the glass. And then the car slammed into the roadblock with a horrible rending noise of screaming metal and yelling men, and her body hit the windscreen and it burst free. Her momentum carrying her, she rolled through the front of the car and into the raised bonnet.

Her weight sent it crashing down onto the engine, trapping buzzing squids amid the racing engine's innards, and she rolled through a holocaust of shattered glass. She tumbled over the bonnet and then the roof of the panda car. She felt her flesh bruise and lacerate as she bashed against unidentified bits of metal and glass was driven into her skin. With a crunch, she landed onto the ground in an unceremonious heap, half-conscious and with the thing wrapped around her hand twitching spasmodically and reaching for her.

She came back to full awareness as someone kicked it off her hand and shot it though the head with the deafening report of a rifle close to her ear. There was something unmistakably cold and heavy pointed just behind her right ear, and a heavy metal bracelet was being fastened on her left wrist.

Before her hand could be pulled behind her to meet her other wrist, there were cries of surprise from above her, a scream of pain and a meaty slap that sounded final. She rolled over, to see a figure in black standing above her, his face a mask of dreadful tight-lipped concentration yet with the moist redness of recent tears in his eyes.

It was Susan's chauffeur. He had grabbed the barrel of the gun that was pressed to her skull and savagely twisted, flipping the policeman head-over-heels and driving a knee into his stomach. "What the . . . ?" exclaimed the other officer as the first crashed unconscious to the ground. He got no further before Neil smashed him in the base of the breastbone with the heel of his hand, sending him skittering backwards with his breath juddering in his chest, plucking the rifle out of his grasp as he did so. "Stay down!" he ordered her, lifting the weapon to his shoulder and systematically shooting the metallic squids screaming towards them.

But she was having none of that; she grabbed the first officer's rifel and vaulted back to her feet. "I'm not a bloody defenseless female!" she screamed, "I'm the heroine of the damn story!" She pointed the gun at one of the things diving for her and blew it out of the sky in a shower of razor-sharp metal fragments.

He inclined his head with new respect. "Then cover my six," he said. She snorted.

"_Your_ six?" she asked dismissively. "Again, _protagonist_." She set her spine against his – he was a comfortable inch taller than her, even in her heels – and sent practiced three-round bursts at the attacking monsters. She felt his shoulders judder with his own gunplay. Calm, collected and well-armed, the horde of attacking squids were no match for them. Most were destroyed in short order and those left chose to pull back. Elizabeth knelt to retrieve a magazine from a policeman's webbing and reloading, looking askance at the man she had to admit was her savior.

There were tears lurking on the edge of him; his face tight-eyed with managed grief. "Are you uninjured?" he asked her. There was an edge in his accent she hadn't noticed before – central European, possibly northern Italian or Swiss. She nodded, but feeling the fragments of glass tinkle through her hair and blood trickle down her brow.

Elizabeth took in the scene with an amazed and shocked glance – the bridge was covered in scattered car accidents, spilled petrol burning greasily in the mid-morning air, glass flashing like lost diamonds on the road. There was a fire under the bonnet of her car, the engine still racing, and as she watched the fire reached the fuel pump and it exploded in a red and orange fireball. She and Neil winced and shielded their eyes from the rain of burning paint and hot glass. _Well,_ she thought grimly,_ at least I didn't drive it off the bridge. _Around them, the groans of the injured mingled with the crackle of flames and the distant sound of sirens. Neil turned to her, carefully pulling fragments of glass from her hair and pressing a cloth covered in something that stung her wounds to the cuts. "Miss Pevensie informed me in her letter you would require assistance," he said tautly. "She explained a number of things."

Elizabeth looked at him; he was handsome, tall and muscular, in his early thirties, with a fierce determination radiating from him and clearly combat-trained. "What did she tell you?" she asked. He shook his head.

"I am not at liberty to tell you, Mrs Studdock," he said formally. He scanned the horizon, hearing the wail of sirens approaching and knowing that the writhe of tentacles was not far away. "Nor do we have time – you must go." Elizabeth lowered her head, blinking tears away as the realization of grief managed to push its way through the otherworldly insanity of the day.

"Susan is dead," she said softly, "killed by those things. I . . . I thought you should know." She looked up, Neil's eyes were glittering with tears. He nodded.

"She is foremost of those that I would hear praised . . ." he began, his voice cracking. And then he swept a hand brusquely over his eyes, shaking his head. "I will talk no more of books or the long war," he said flatly and obliquely. He flicked his head. "Go! Defend your son!" Around them, the terrain was beginning to crawl with glinting metallic shapes that flashed in the sun. Elizabeth stooped, hauling a motorcycle upright whose rider had skidded and crashed on the bridge. The engine was still running, the hot exhaust making the spilled oil and tar of the road smoke. And then she stopped and looked at him.

"Who _are_ you?" she asked. He smiled and shook his head.

"Come now, Mrs Studdock – no-one is ever told any story but their own." And then he saluted her with a curious gesture of his thumb and first two fingers pointing in different directions and sprinted for the railing, vaulting it and diving into the river below. Elizabeth threw one leg over the motorbike and twisted the accelerator, laying a long S of melted rubber on the road, and raced over the bridge. Behind her, the wail of sirens receeded until the noise of honking Pimlico traffic drowned it out.

She drove fast as she could, leaning into the bike, steering with her bodyweight more than the handlebars, taking risks and jumping lights. She risked glances in the mirror – there didn't seem to be anything following her, but that could have just been the distance and her speed.

_Unless they know where I am going and are taking a shortcut,_ she mused grimly. She twisted the accelerator again and felt the kick of speed in the strain across her shoulders and bruised forearms. She flashed through Victoria, skirted the eastern edge of Belgravia and howled through Hyde Park Corner leaving swearing and horns in her wake. As she tore up Park Lane at well over one hundred miles an hour, the wind whipped at her eyes and hair, dragging tears from the former and glass from the latter. Sirens were howling behind her as she skidded through the right hand turn onto Upper Brook Street, damn the lights and the Hell with the speedometer.

She drove through traffic, weaving around swerving cars. As she zoomed over the south-bound side of the dual carriageway, an articulated lorry slammed on the brakes, trying to stop and avoid crashing into her. It wasn't going to manage it – she hauled the handlebars over to the right and leaned. The bike slammed down on the pavement and – in a shower of sparks and with inches to spare – slid at about fifty miles an hour under the body of the truck. She jerked the machine upright, ignoring the pieces of gravel that had been flicked into her face and zoomed towards Grosvenor Square.

She burst through an American checkpoint like it wasn't there, howling past it before the police officer could even raise his hand to make her stop. She drove across the square itself, in defiance of all bylaws – posted or not – cutting from the north west to south eastern corner. She roared down Carlos Place, bringing the bike to a smoking halt and a shower of gravel that pattered against the leaded glass of the cloister of the Church on Mount Street. She was off the bike in a second, sprinting as well as her battered muscles would allow her towards the door. She crashed through the heavy oak and ran into the building, instinctively stopping to dip her fingertips in the holy water by the door, make the sign of the cross and genuflect.

It was the pause in her head-long flight that gave her the split second she needed to take in the memorial that was part of the side-altar. The whole thing was only a foot across, carved from blue-gray marble veined with red and white threads. It depicted patient wolves standing grieving around the silent corpse of a young man, dressed as a crusader, being cradled in the paws of a lion. Both the boy and the lion bore identical knife wounds on their chests, and the eyes of the wolves were inlaid with amber. A brass plaque – suspiciously clean, and which Elizabeth suspected would yield Susan's fingerprints – was set into the stone. In beautiful copperplate script, the following words were etched;

_Of your charity, pray for the repose of the soul of Edmund Pevensie 1930-1949_

_Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,  
and before you were born I consecrated you;  
I appointed you a prophet to the nations._

In an expensive silver frame, in front of which was lying a single red rose cut that very day, there was an old photograph, black and white and yellowing with age, of a young man, standing in the courtyard of the Church, his face full of promise – Elizabeth knew enough of the Jesuits to recognize a Candidate for the Novitiate.

There was no mistaking it – the boy in the photograph was Edmund Pevensie. Older, certainly, than she had known him in Narnia, but unquestionably the same person. Grief took Elizabeth and shook her like a rat – to see Susan die and to be reminded the rest of her family had died in a senseless accident was just too cruel.

All of this happened in a moment, and then she realized that while the boy she had wished could have been her son was dead, the same thing might very well happen to her own child if she did not move. She span on her heel and moved into the Church proper, only to be met by the tall pastor of Immaculate Conception, his bright eyes twinkling above his neatly-trimmed beard. "Elizabeth?" he asked her, taking in her torn clothes and dozens of superficial wounds. "Whatever is the matter?"

She did not waste time on preliminaries. "Where is my son?" she asked. The priest looked puzzled.

"He'll be in the parish hall, Elizabeth – is there something wrong?" Before she could answer, a sickening noise cut through the Church – the sound of shattering glass and wailing children. She didn't answer him, but set off at a run across the nave of the Church, running towards the door that lead to the parish hall, snatching a heavy brass candlestand up as she did so. She was about to wrench the door open when it burst open and what seemed like a tide of screaming children ran past her.

They knocked her backwards, their little star-shaped hands grabbing at her legs, wild-eyed with terror. She pushed a couple of them aside, and then shouldered aside their teacher and her two teenage aides who were screaming just as much as the kids, if not more. "Out of my way!" she yelled, "Out of my way!"

It was the same sort of things as before – seemingly dozens of them. They had smashed through the window of the classroom, upsetting the whiteboard and the wooden model of Noah's Ark. Boxwood pairs of animals were still bouncing, two by two, on the floor. Elizabeth hefted the heavy candlestand and whacked the first of the things in the head. It sparked and smashed into the wall, the corner of the base crushing its skull. She reversed her grip and – as a writhing tide of the things pushed her back into the Church – pinned another through the eyes to a beautifully carved wood and gilt side-altar.

The rest of them – realizing she was the threat – sprang for her. The point of the candlestand was transfixing the Immaculate Heart of Mary, trapped there, and a forest of tentacles wrapped themselves around her hands, prying her fingers off the metal. Their sheer weight of numbers was simply too great, and the children weren't helping with their screaming and wailing. Her legs were immobilized, one arm trapped. She could see – through the haze of writhing metal – the priest and teacher trying to get the children away, and a couple of the monsters concentrating on Edmund Michael, wrapping their tentacles around his limbs, claws snapping for his eyes and throat.

Rage and desperation lent her strength and she shook her arm free. But there were just too many of them – a writhing mass of constricting steel snakes was around her throat, cutting oxygen off from her brain and muscles. She was weary and grief-stricken – she just didn't have enough left to give.

"Lord, into your hands I commend my spirit," she meant to say, but her sensual lips smoothly articulated different words. "Saint Michael, the Archangel, defend me in battle . . ."

A tearing sensation as a truth-sharp sword passed between realities in a slash of light of a nameless color, and a figure appeared standing on the right side of the altar, tall and well-made, his naked flesh glowing bronze and alabaster, clothed only in hologram-colored wings that wrapped around him and veiled his burning eyes.

He raised his hand in a gesture of banishment or censure. Metal melted and vaporized, the air filling with the glutinous, clean scent of heated steel and brass. In a haze of burning iron, the things turned to wisps of metallic smoke, searingly hot for a moment and then swept away with the scentless, chill air that comes from out of the cloud on Sinai. Silence fell, the children stopped screaming, and the priest crossed himself in frank amazement.

As when a scroll is rolled together, the figure turned to face the stunned and terrified Elizabeth.

"Do not be afraid," said the Archangel of War.

**A/n :** Okay, this is the end of part I! A few minor notes;

The words on Edmund's memorial are from the first chapter of the Book of Jeremiah.

As is common throughout my work, this chapter makes a lot of references to other things, and contains a number of "in-jokes" at it were. There will be a special prize of _knowing you are clever_ to anyone who can notice any or all of them! As a small clue, the words Neil quotes are from a poem – by who, you will have to find out for yourself!

As can clearly be seen, this is a _science fiction_ story. Sorry if you were expecting something else! I am trying to convey a sort of 1950s sci-fi element to the story proper, but this early section is obviously set in a version of "now" and therefore the 1950s touches are less obvious.


	10. Interlude - Response Ability

**Interlude : Response Ability**

For a moment or two, Elizabeth simply stood slack-jawed, staring at the ageless face of the archangel like a yokel at the shell game; amazed and stunned by something beyond her comprehension which she nevertheless found fascinating and wonderful and intriguing, and which she would have dearly-loved to show to her friends.

And then pre-Adamite instructions and instincts smashed through thousands of years of Original Sin and she leaped forward, flinging her arms around the massive shoulders of the angel and burying her tear-streaked face in his neck. "_Michael!_" She sobbed and tangled her hands in his hair, her arms wrapping around velvet-wrapped steel and stone as a hand that had offered incense before the Throne lay comfortingly along her back within inches of her heart. Idiotically, she gasped, "You're back!"

"I was never away," said the voice she had loved and obeyed and fancied she had heard in her soul at the most trying moments of the last five years. _How strange it is,_ she mused, _that the Champion of the Heavenly Host takes on the role of the Metatron for me – that he is the Voice of God more often than not._ Helplessly, she sobbed and cried as Michael gently disengaged and picked Edmund Michael up and put him in her arms. Furiously, she clung to him, balancing him on her hip and kissing him, sweeping her hands over his terrified face. The boy looked at the angel – comparing the titanium-carved marble of his face and diamond-cut crystal of his eyes with his own soft pink star-shaped hands and his mother's steel-hard voluptuous curves. He turned to her.

"Mummy, who is the angel?" Elizabeth choked out a laugh, fresh tears streaming down her face. Around her, the rest of the nursery group, the priest and the teacher were looking at him with a mixture of shock, disgust, disbelief and plain, simple wonder.

"His name is Michael," said Elizabeth, hosting her son up in her arms. She pointed to a window of the church, where a credible – although utterly unlike – representation of the angel glowed in translucent color. "Remember? The one who beat the dragon?" Edmund Michael nodded, turning back to the naked figure and looking at him again with awestruck pious curiosity. Michael's eyes encompassed him with a dreadful love. The teacher – thrusting her charges behind her – hemmed and hawed.

"Look, I don't know who the Hell you think you are," she began blusteringly, "but you don't just walk naked into a Church and . . ." Elizabeth and the priest exchanged a disbelieving glance that could be read as easily as any parable; _Can't she see the wings? Didn't she notice he just popped out of nowhere? Can't she smell the incense and the taste the perfection?_ Michael turned to the woman with an expression devoid of the sickly smile that would have been stitched onto a human's face.

"Then the eyes of both were opened . . ." he said with a dreadful finality. He stretched out one searing hand and pressed his fingers to her eyeballs. There was a horrid sizzling, and the toothsome, greasy stench of burning meat filled the air. Smoke rose from the archangel's fingertips – not from the woman's eyes – as she staggered away from him. ". . . and they hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God." He watched dispassionately as the woman collapsed to the ground, screaming – not in pain, but horrified realization – and scrabbling at her eyes.

She blinked and looked up at Michael, extending a trembling hand. "Oh, God! It's so bright! It's so _beautiful!_" And then, as she caught sight of herself in the mirror-polished metal of his sword, fruitless confessions of guilt and howling requests for clemency spilled from her lips. "I never meant to! I didn't mean it! I'm _sorry!_"

"On your feet!" snapped Michael. "I have carried mercy, but not today. Do I look like _I_ can offer you absolution? I am not Christ!" He flicked his head towards the priest. "Father?" he said deferentially.

The man was trembling in every limb. "Depart from me, oh prince of the Heavenly host," he said, his hands tangled in his rosary beads to at least try to arrest the terrible ague of fear, "for I am a sinful man!" Michael gestured at the woman on the floor.

"Of course you are," he said, "you are human. But you are also a priest of the order of Melchisedech – you are the only one who can help her right now." The priest – realizing what was needed of him – nodded and gulped nervously, making to kneel down and help the woman to the confessional. But Michael stopped him and took his hands in his, bending his head to kiss them. "Thank you for your priesthood, Father," he said quietly.

The priest looked shocked for a moment, and then helped the gasping woman to her feet. As he lead her off, she began the sacrament – vanity and shame burned from her and with humility branded on her soul – even before they were out of Elizabeth's earshot. "Bless me, Father, for I have sinned . . . it has been two years since my last confession . . ."

Around Michael, the toddlers were looking at him with mouths and eyes the shape of perfect Os, little chubby hands reaching out to touch his glowing wings and reaching to grip the fingers that had killed one hundred and eighty five thousand Assyrians with their dimpled fists. One of the teenagers was slinking out of the door, shaking her head, while the other was on her knees facing the tabernacle, head bowed in contrition, her lips moving in silent prayer. Edmund Michael turned back to his mother.

"Mummy," he asked, "is he your guardian angel?" She laughed, blushing slightly.

"Oh, no, Edmund!" she exclaimed, embarrassed her son could make such an error. "He's far more important than _that!_" She looked at the angel, shrugging. "I'm sorry, Michael – you know what children are like . . ." She drifted off as he reached out, his hand brushing the hair of the innocents gathered around him – not a one of them afraid, not a one of them awed to obsequious deference, simply all of them in gaping and staring in wonder – and caressed Edmund Michael's face.

"And what, Elizabeth," said Michael softly, "is more important than guarding that which is made in the image of Almighty God from herself and the rest of her enemies?" His unsmiling face seemed to soften in a way that eyes could not see as Edmund Michael smiled and stared at him in rapture. "Yes, I know very well what children are like – they are generally right more often than not if you ask them a question about God before humanity tells them an answer." In the shocked silence following that statement, Elizabeth let her son slip from her arms to stand on the floor. As he reached towards the archangel, brushing his fingertips along the glowing molten bronze of his skin, she swept her hair off her face and sniffed the tears away.

"_You're_ my . . . ?" she began, and then came to a conclusion. "But . . . you're _Michael_, you're the champion, the leader, the _first_ . . . I mean . . ." Michael did not answer her, but her words died away as he sank to a crouch on the floor, his six wings folding around him like a cloak and encompassing the amazed children. He lifted the youngest one – scarcely a toddler – and set her on his knee. She reached up and ineffectually grabbed at his face with hands that did not yet have the motor control necessary.

"When you were younger than this, I was chosen for you," he said softly. "When you were a single fertilized cell, I was there. When you implanted in the lining of your mother's womb, I was with you. When you were born and whimpered at the cold air of the world, I whispered love into your heart. When you slept in your crib, I watched over you. When you were a child and you thought everyone hated you, I loved you. When you were an adolescent and you rebelled against the world, I held the doorway back open for you. When you were a woman and you wandered far from where you should be, I always kept a map." He looked up at her tear-streaked face and heaving chest. "We are all your guardians, Elizabeth – but I am the one who was chosen for you." He stood, his wings sweeping back and his glory vanishing like the fading afterimage of a lightning bolt. He stood before her, immaculate and immobile in black cotton and linen, blandly handsome and altogether the same as any anatomical model. "And, yes – it was I who fought the Dragon and I who contended with Satan over the body of Moses. Which do you think God loves me more for?"

Elizabeth was sniveling, tears streaming uncontrollably down her face, her breath hitching in her chest and her lungs hicoughing. "You . . . you stayed with me. You were always there. An angel of the Lord – the champion of the Heavenly Host . . . you _stayed_ with me!" She reached for him, unsure if it were an imposition, and then simply flung herself into his arms. "I _love_ you, you know," she wept. "I do, I really do. And I know when I pray I never tell you that, and all I ever do is ask for things, but I _do_ love you and I _am_ grateful!" She sobbed into his chest, beating her fists against his shoulders. "Damnit, Michael!" she howled, "Why did you stay? Why didn't you just let me rot? How come the only friend who stayed with me all my life is the one I never even sent a bloody Christmas card to?" His arms wrapped around her, stroking her hair and soothing her tears.

"Because that is what I am," he said softly. "Only in obedience are any of us complete. I am made to love and praise God, and you are made in His image." He placed his hands on her shoulders and moved her back to stand on her own. "And it was I who lead the celebration in Heaven when you came back. I remember the ringing of trumpets and the clashing of cymbals, the cheers from around the Throne." He looked into her disbelieving eyes. "You can't understand or imagine the joy that echoed around around the universe on that day, Elizabeth." She wiped away her tears and stared at him as if he were mad.

"For _me_?" she asked, incredulous, "Just what am I that I am so important?" Michael shrugged.

"You are a child of God, Elizabeth," he said simply. "What greater joy is there in Heaven but one of its daughters coming home?"

_Daughters coming home_. That phrase struck her, and her shoulders slumped. "Another daughter really has come home today, hasn't she?" she said sadly, her lip trembling. "And before you tell me that she was going to die sometime," she said, holding her hand up to forestall his criticisms, "and that my grief is irrational, yes, I know! I'm not grieving for her, I'm just selfishly grieving for _me_." She looked at the angel. "What am I doing here, Michael? What is going on? What the Hell _were_ those things?" She passed her hand over her eyes. "I've been brought into a world I don't recognize and I don't know – everyone I knew is dead." She paused, sighing deeply. "I wish they hadn't died in the train crash – I would have loved to have seen them again."

Michael waited until her emotion had run its course and she had finished and then shook his head. "You will not like the world that their survival would have created," he said flatly. She raised her head, her eyes red and taut but determined.

"And I presume by the fact you say I _will_ not like it that what I want is irrelevant?" she asked silverly. Michael nodded, without a hint of apology. "Oh, well, isn't that just dandy?" hissed Elizabeth. "What is it this time? Some flaw within me needs to be excised by yet another war? More blood spilled to encourage me to wash away my sins?" It was telling, perhaps, of her own strength and just how far she had come in five years – even though she did not recognize it – she did not think she was there in order to help anyone but herself. Her humility would allow her nothing less than total responsibility and acceptance of her own, inevitable, weakness and her experiences as tempering fires for her. She wasn't seeing herself as a tool to perform a task, she was seeing herself as a flawed ingot to be shaped. Michael shook his head.

"No, Elizabeth – this is not for you. This is for others. You said – on the field of Glasswater – you were taken to Narnia so that, by knowing him there, you might know Him here. But, as I told you, that isn't the only reason." She looked at him, drawing her son towards her and cuddling him to her hip, his arms around her waist. Michael looked at her, the shift in his face she could recognize as his replacement for a smile washing over it. "You have heard it said no-one is ever told any story but their own, and no-one is told what _would_ have happened – but, amen, amen I say unto you, that is not the whole truth." She nodded, a dim sense of awareness and understanding sweeping over her.

"I see," she said softly. She winced as Edmund Michael squeezed a bruise she couldn't remember receiving. "And I suppose that I have no choice in this matter, as ever?" Michael looked – if it were possible – puzzled.

"Choice?" he asked. "Of course you have a choice, Elizabeth – you always have a choice. The grace that has been given to you makes you _capable_ of making a free choice, it does not take it away. What you want is irrelevant, but what you choose is paramount. This is your response ability, Elizabeth – you know, better than most, what saying 'yes' may entail. You do not have the perfect clarity of the immaculate conception, but your glass is clearer than most." He paused. "The choice is set before you, and you are a creature of free-will." Elizabeth bowed her head before the ancient angel.

"And I choose to obey," she said simply. She looked down at her son – perhaps considering if he really _was_ her son, or if she was a woman other than his mother. "While I am away, will you . . . ?" She left the sentence unfinished, realizing that there was a promise far greater than that in place here. But Michael surprised her.

"No harm will befall him; you have my word sworn by the Eternal Word," he said firmly. She smiled.

"Thank you, Michael," she said softly. He shook his head.

"No," he said, "thank _you_. There have always been too few of the right sort of 'yeses'."

And then her world was unmade.


End file.
